9 Signs You Should Switch to the HubSpot CRM

Switching CRMs is a pretty big deal for a business.

CRMs hold all of your company's deal and contact records and you don’t want to do anything that will jeopardize the integrity of that data, so, making a switch inevitably requires countless hours of research to find the right combination of features and functions your team will utilize.

The truth is, with all that is involved, no one looks forward to orchestrating this change... well… ever.

So, if you’re going to, it’s best to get it right the first time.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably about to pull the trigger and sign up for the HubSpot CRM but are still unsure if its the right move.

Let’s walk through exactly how you know that switching to the HubSpot CRM is right for you and your team.

But first, the facts.

The Facts

First, the BEST CRM out there is the one your team actually uses.

No matter how much Googling you do, no matter how much money you throw at this, the bottom line is that if the team doesn’t use it, it is useless.

This is the single most important thing if you’re trying to roll out a CRM for the first time or are transitioning from one CRM to another. It only works if you use it.

Second, the configuration process will never be done.

Too often we see organizations hit analysis paralysis when trying to configure their CRM properties and refuse to launch the tool until it’s “perfect.”

These customizations range anywhere from determining what properties we capture when manually creating contacts to deciding on how many sales pipelines we need to what stages go in each pipeline.

We can go deeper into what properties we require when moving deals through the pipeline and what we collect on our forms.

Hate to break it to you, but with all these possibilities, this day of perfection will never come.

You will get this to a very good and usable place with your CRM but you have to understand there will always be room to grow.

The team will use it and provide feedback and it is your responsibility to listen and adapt.

Lastly, a CRM is a tool.

It is not a strategy and it is not a short cut to success. It doesn’t do your work for you; it makes it easier to do.

Organizations that implement and actually use a CRM are the ones that understand that it can facilitate success, but it does not guarantee it.

If you disagree with me, you should probably stop reading now. If you’re still with me, great!

The HubSpot CRM is not the best fit for every sales and marketing team, but it does a lot of things really well.

Over the years, we’ve seen a lot of people switch to, and from it and love it.

After working with hundreds of these organizations, here are the most common signs we’ve seen that that switching to the HubSpot CRM is the right decision.

Signs You Should Switch to the HubSpot CRM

1. You’re Using an Outdated or Homegrown CRM

“Homegrown CRMs” are those completely custom and built from the ground up by your organization.

These solutions are usually desirable because they require less of an upfront investment to deploy but, unlike out-of-the-box commercial CRMs, they don’t inherently have a team dedicated to improving them

This solution may work for a little while, but, as other programs evolve and user experiences improve, your do-it-yourself CRM will begin to stagnate.

If you use a homegrown CRM, you’ve probably find yourself in at least one of the following situations:

• Trying to integrate with a new sales and/or marketing tool and not having the proper connectivity
• If your development team is in house, waiting weeks or months for them to create, test, and deploy the integration
• If your development team is outsourced, waiting weeks or months to find a team that can do the job, then create, test, and deploy.

The frustration of waiting for buy-in or deployment  to when you actually start using it can be the difference of it being a success and a waste of money.

And no one likes wasting money.

The HubSpot CRM is updated on almost a weekly basis with new connectivity, UI/UX, and tool enhancements and at the time of writing this, HubSpot Connect supports integrations for 320 apps and web services. With these regular updates, you never have to worry about your tool being obsolete.

2. You Lack Sales Pipeline Visibility as a Manager

Can you forecast how much revenue your sales team will bring in by the end of the month?

Do you know how many deals have proposals out to them but haven’t signed yet?

Can you tell me how many stalled deals are in your pipeline?

Do you know what activities take up the bulk of your sales team’s time?

As a sales leader, you have aggressive goals and are expected to hit them. If you don’t, you’ll have to explain why to any number of people in the organization.

Let’s suppose you don’t have to report to anyone. You’re probably at the top of the org-chart, but you now have even more incentive to know your numbers as the future of the business sits on your shoulders.

To be clear, a sales pipeline is not a way for sales leaders to micromanage their teams.

It is to understand how many leads you are working, getting a handle on forecasting, so you can budget and plan properly.

Are we overselling and overcommitting ourselves and now we are unable to deliver on the promises we’ve made to customers?

What is the ROI of one salesperson?

How many sales do we need to make before we have to hire for the sales team?

How many sales do we need to make before we have to hire for the product delivery and/or support team?

If its questions and scenarios like these that keep you up at night, the HubSpot CRM is for you.

HubSpot directly addresses these issues with its custom reporting tools and sales & marketing dashboards.

3. You’re Not Getting Any Actionable Insights From Your Sales Pipeline

At the surface this feels the same as #2 because it revolves around better understanding your pipeline, but the symptoms are different.

When you look at your pipeline, as it stands today, can it teach you anything about your leads?

Where do our best (and worst) leads come from?

What stage in the buying process most leads become disqualified?

What makes a good lead?

Why are we disqualifying so many leads and what are we doing about it?

You shouldn’t be making decisions based on assumptions on how people buy, but rather what your prospects and sales team have told you the problems are.

When we think about actionable insights from our sales pipeline, we are focusing on sales enablement.

Sales people want to sell. Having worked on a few sales teams in my career, it is safe to say that every salesperson has 101 reasons why a lead was bad.

If they are saying the leads are bad, they probably are.  So when they kick these leads back, does your CRM have a process in place that can collect insights on this so you can take action and get better leads?

These are some of the most important questions you should be asking when you look at your sales pipeline.

If you can’t answer some of these questions, and you want to, it is probably time to switch to the HubSpot CRM.

This pain can also solved directly this with HubSpot’s custom reporting and dashboard tools.

4. You’re Using Email And/Or Excel Sheets Track All Your Deals

If your deals live in your inbox or an Excel sheet, odds are you are feeling the pain most of what was mentioned above so I don’t think it bears repeating, but you’ve probably also asked yourself some of these questions:

When was the last time I reached out to this prospect?

Did I respond to this lead yet?

Has the prospect opened the email yet?

How many times have they opened the email?

They opened the email, but did they click or view the proposal?

As the list of questions goes on, they get harder and then near impossible to answer without a CRM.

When your sales team has answers to questions like these, they go from being intrusive to helpful.

Salespeople who operate in a vacuum and have no clue what their prospects are thinking or doing aren’t very helpful. With the HubSpot CRMs activity log and quick task follow ups, these problems are a thing of the past.

5. Your Sales Team Lacks Website Intel

Understanding what our visitors are doing on our website is typically the primary reason we all signed up for HubSpot in the first place.

Like your marketing team, your sales team should be able to answer questions like:

How have our prospects interacted with marketing emails?

How many times they visited our website?

Which pages have they viewed?

How many articles they read?

What videos they watched?

Not only will this help your sales team better understand your prospects but it will help them provide insight into how the sales process can be improved on the website

What if you knew that all your prospects had to do was read 30 pages of your website, or watch 10 videos, and your sales team would close 80% of the time?

What kind of impact would an 80% close rate have on your business?

The HubSpot CRM uses a cookie tracking to give you team the granular access to all we’ve mentioned above and more.

Now, odds are you’re lacking this data for any number of reasons, one being...

6. You Are Using Separate CRMs for Sales & Marketing

If you are using one CRM for marketing and one CRM for sales, it’s time to talk about consolidating.

We frequently see teams using the HubSpot Marketing Hub and the accompanying CRM to collect website visitor intelligence only to have the sales team keeping their deal data in another.

This not only doubles your work, but keeps sales and marketing siloed without visibility into a contact’s behavior or activity in the other’s funnel.

Why isn’t your sales team utilizing the lead intelligence your marketing team worked so hard to get?

Having one CRM where both sales and marketing document and view activity gives both teams greater insight into their contact’s activity and overall experience with your brand.

Using two CRMs also opens the door for one of the most common reasons we see organizations switch to the HubSpot CRM.

7. You’ve Had Integration Issues

Integration issues come in a few forms but the two most common with CRMs are hitting your API call limits and property mapping errors.

They aren’t the difficult issues to resolve but you need to know what you’re doing to actually resolve it and doing so can be time consuming.

If you’re not bound by an industry regulation or have your CRM tied to a SaaS product, switching to the HubSpot CRM alleves these issues all together because it is inherently linked to the HubSpot marketing platform. No integration needed.

8. You’re Unable to Report on How Marketing Activities Impact Revenue

Most people will identify with this sign because it is a symptom of a lot of what I’ve already shared.  

Integration issues, using two CRMS, lacking insight into the sales pipeline, and lacking a sales pipeline all come together here.

As marketers, we are judged on how well we drive traffic, leads, and sales.

If the deals you close aren’t getting tracked in HubSpot and you aren’t able to close the loop on what web pages, emails, and collateral directly influenced a sale, you can’t know what your prospects actually find valuable.

When we connect the dots between closed sales and marketing efforts, our marketing team becomes profit center instead of a cost center.

The HubSpot CRM helps you see all of that information in one place.

9. You Juggle Multiple Sales Tools

“Sure! Give me another thing to do!” -- said no sales person ever.

We add tools to the belt because we want to make our lives easier. Plain and simple.

So when we find ourselves using this tool to schedule meetings, that tool video conference, and keep our email templates in a Google Doc that you copy and paste from, it’s natural to feel a bit scattered.

These tools are designed to remove friction from your sales process and save your team time, not make things difficult.

Your CRM should connect all of these applications so your sales team can quickly complete these actions all in one place, never leaving the tab.

The HubSpot CRM makes this possible! It can integrate with 320 apps and web services and baked right into the CRM is the ability to create email copy templates, create short, reusable text blocks (called snippets), and connect your calendar for meeting links.

No need for dozens of additional tools.

The Bottom Line and Next Steps

If you’re experiencing even one of the symptoms I mentioned above, I highly recommend checking the HubSpot CRM.

The HubSpot CRM is actually free. So, take it for a test drive any time you want and upgrade to unlock new features as you grow in the tools.

Learn the platform and take it as far as you can on your own. There is ALWAYS room to grow.