HubSpot is a single tool that does a LOT of things for businesses. It's a CRM...but it's also a website builder, a social media poster, a sales enablement tool...and...and...
The key to understanding what HubSpot can do is to understand the structure of HubSpot: one central CRM surrounded by 5 optional Hubs.
This can be confusing, so let's break it down. Here's what you need to know about the main HubSpot Hubs.
What is HubSpot?
HubSpot is a CRM platform with all the software, integrations, and resources you need to connect your marketing, sales, content management, and customer service. HubSpot’s connected platform enables you to grow your business faster by focusing on what matters most: your customers.
HubSpot gives your entire organization a singular place and tool to manage the whole customer journey, from marketing and content management to sales and customer service. At the core of HubSpot is their CRM, or Customer Relationship Management tool. It helps manage, track, and store information about your past, present, and potential future customers (and any other folks you might want to keep track of, like vendors or partners). This is the start of everything, and the basis on which everything runs through HubSpot.
Then there are five main Hubs that branch out from the CRM.
An Introduction to the Five Main HubSpot Hubs
1. Sales Hub: Close More Deals Faster
Sales is always looking for ways to get more: More pipelines, more deals, and more revenue. While HubSpot can’t take over the actual selling (that’s what the sales team is paid the big bucks for), it CAN supercharge their efforts, taking a lot of the menial labor off their hands, speeding up their processes, and letting them focus on what they do best: sell.
HubSpot Sales Hub gives your sales team access to the tools within the platform that allows them to manage their actual sales outreach - through calls, emails, SMS or social media. But it also gives them the necessary information and insights into their prospects’ behaviors to enable personalized conversations that convert prospects into customers.
Sales Hub is your database, sales enablement platform, outreach tracker, organizer, enabler and reporting tool all rolled into one.
→ Explore Sales Hub in-depth in our FREE ultimate guide to HubSpot
2. Marketing Hub: Engage and Satisfy Your Customers
When you think of Marketing, it’s easy to focus on the output - your specific ads, social media posts, blogs and emails - but also, how that content makes it out into the world and how you track its ability to get you leads.
Marketers know that their efforts are about far more than generating instant leads. It’s about crafting the journey a contact will take: from their initial attraction to your message, the tipping point where they begin engaging with what you have to say, and delivering on the promise you made during the story you’ve told them along the way.
From creating content to reporting and tracking marketing activities, Marketing Hub is a set of tools that allow your Marketing team to manage their efforts in one place. This “one place” is the secret sauce that makes Marketing Hub so powerful. From creating content for your website, blog, and social media to SEO and campaign management, Marketing Hub provides an all-in-one platform.
→ Explore Marketing Hub in-depth in our FREE ultimate guide to HubSpot
3. CMS Hub: Close More Deals Faster
Your website is at the core of your digital marketing efforts. It is the "air traffic controller" for all your activities and the many paths and journeys your potential and current customers can take with your organization. Since it's such a central part of your brand, it's surprising to see how many company websites take a backseat to newer or shinier channels that seem like they could deliver quick wins. However, your website is often the point of conversion for your contacts. Many organizations use an outdated, difficult-to-use CMS (Content Management System).
Your team and your website deserve better.
CMS Hub allows you to build and manage your website, from functionality to design and content. But it is much more than that. CMS Hub is designed with both developers and marketers in mind, meaning devs have the control they want and need to create, optimize, and structure pages best, while marketers can use drag-and-drop tools to quickly and easily build and update content. With built-in SEO tools, optimizing your site to current standards is easy.
→ Explore CMS Hub in-depth in our FREE ultimate guide to HubSpot
4. Service Hub: Delight Your Customers
Bad customer service is one of the number one reasons good clients leave, and when your good clients leave, your growth and profitability follow. However, service teams often face a lack of resources and adequate time. What if your customer service team could have the tools to respond to customers quickly, understand their situation, and answer their questions, all from within a single place?
Then your customer service team could focus on providing the best experience possible and ensure your customers stay delighted with your organization throughout their time with you.
HubSpot’s Service Hub provides all the tools to manage conversations and relationships with your clients.
→ Explore Service Hub in-depth in our FREE ultimate guide to HubSpot
5. Operations Hub: Streamline Internal Processes
The newest addition to the HubSpot platform, Operations Hub is an unsung hero that connects the dots. It works a little differently compared to the rest of the Hubs - where it truly shines is in what it does for all other Hubs, not what it does alone.
Your data typically comes from a number of sources: from your different marketing channels of course, with all the variations of how data is stored or created in each of those sources to manage, but also from your sales and customer service teams. As they update information based on their research and conversations with contacts, each and every input is an opportunity for errors to occur, most often based on human actions.
Where does Operations Hub come into all this?
HubSpot Operations Hub is your Data Quality command center, identifying unstandardized data, and allowing you to review, correct and automate that correction moving forward. Not only does Operations Hub help with cleaning the data that lives within HubSpot, but it also serves as the connection point between HubSpot and other data sources, letting you integrate all of your platforms and make HubSpot your genuine single source of truth with consistent data.
→ Explore Operations Hub in-depth in our FREE ultimate guide to HubSpot
HubSpot is a powerful CRM platform that offers tools to help businesses effectively manage their operations. With the five main Hubs - Sales Hub, Marketing Hub, CMS Hub, Service Hub, and Operations Hub - HubSpot provides a comprehensive solution for businesses to grow and thrive.
Now that you know the basics of the Hubs, now the question is: is HubSpot valuable for your business? To answer that question, you need our ultimate guide.
