HubSpot is a software solution for growing businesses to manage their CRM, marketing, sales, service and operations from one, comprehensive platform.
HubSpot built its platform and brand for young, growing businesses.
The Starter Suite bundle, which includes Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, and Operations Hub, in particular is engineered for the youngest startups and built upon HubSpot’s free CRM.
While the Starter Suite is HubSpot’s entry-tier bundle, it’s a powerful collection of tools built for startups to manage and execute their marketing, sales, service, and data strategies.
Starter Suite is particularly useful for growing businesses because the software is flexible and grows along with a company in an extremely scalable fashion.
Meaning that as your business demands more power from HubSpot, it’s just a few clicks away and can be up and running quickly.
We wrote this guide for businesses and people who are new to HubSpot or need help maximizing their Starter Suite bundle. We’ll overview each of the hubs and explain the most important tools to maximize.
Let’s get started!
First and foremost, it’s important to understand how HubSpot is built.
HubSpot’s core product is its CRM. Each of the hubs or bundles are built on top of the CRM.
No matter whether you purchase Marketing Hub or Sales Hub or Starter Suite, the CRM is included in all of those at no cost. You could even “purchase” the CRM for free if you only want the CRM.
It’s important to note the CRM comes with limited functionality, as you add hubs (marketing, sales, service, operations, or CMS) or tier up (starter, professional, enterprise), the more functionality is provided.
The base-CRM is certainly plenty for a young business that’s just getting started.
Here’s the functionality within the CRM we recommend you master.
HubSpot is as powerful as the data allows it to be. The whole point of a CRM is to track all the data in one place, not across spreadsheets and emails.
The Contact and Company Properties are foundational elements to the CRM and enables customer-facing teams to manage and track relationships at a contact or company level.
It’s also important to understand these properties are vital to HubSpot’s reporting dashboards. While HubSpot provides a robust selection of out-of-the-box reports, you can also build custom properties into the contact and company records to input and monitor data specific to your business.
One of the first things you absolutely must do when starting your HubSpot journey is to integrate your email solution with HubSpot.
This is extremely useful as it enables your teams to track and log emails between teams and customers.
Pro tip: as we mentioned before, CRMs are as powerful as the data entered into them. Integrating your email, enables you and your teams to send emails directly from HubSpot. This is a foolproof way to ensure all your communications to customers are logged in the CRM.
The Deals functionality is extremely useful for sales teams to manage and track all interactions and communications with leads and prospects in one place.
Phone calls, emails, meetings, notes and beyond can all be logged within a deal. It also enables your team to track the revenue opportunities associated with each deal.
HubSpot’s Marketing Hub Starter solution is a comprehensive platform that enables users to manage all their marketing tools and data in one place.
Marketing Hub Starter can help your business attract more leads, run inbound marketing campaigns, and convert more customers.
Marketing Hub Starter includes some awesome features like ad tracking and management, live chat, forms, and landing pages, all of which enable businesses to strategize properly, manage their content, and reach intended audiences efficiently.
It’s a great tool for businesses to get started on their marketing journey, as it provides all the tools they need to begin.
Let’s dig into some of the key features your business should understand and optimize.
Forms live on your website and help you convert your leads and visitors. They’re useful for communicating with your website visitors, converting them to prospects, and gaining valuable data.
With Marketing Hub Starter, you’re able to capture customer data with forms by using standard HubSpot properties or custom properties within the forms.
The data these forms aggregate is then brought into your CRM, connected to a contact or company record, and mapped to dashboards to give you powerful insights into your customer journeys.
It also enables you to automate follow-up emails upon form completion to run and provide targeted campaigns to nurture leads
HubSpot allows you to use as many forms as you want so that you can customize and tailor them as you need.
Pro tip: You can also create professional landing pages, live chat or chatbot, and customized pop-ups to engage with your customers with Marketing Hub Starter.
List segmentation refers to bucketing or sorting data on customers or companies to personalize your interactions and engagements with them.
List segmentation is the power behind targeted email campaigns that allow you to send an email about dogs to one customer and an email about cats to another.
The more a business leverages segmentation to provide hyper-personalization, the higher their performance in attracting, converting, and qualifying leads.
Marketing Hub Starter enables you to use segmentation to generate custom lists. The platform allows you to build 25 active lists and 1,000 static lists.
Standard HubSpot properties or custom properties can be used as filters for segmentation. These will make it easier to sort through specific data sets and customize them according to your goals.
Pro tip: Consider segmenting data by geography, products or services purchased, customer demographics, position in the sales funnel, or recent website or email engagement.
Building relationships with your customers is vital.
One of the easiest and most efficient ways to keep them up to speed on your brand and its offerings is through email. Email marketing makes it possible for you to reach and stay in contact with your customer base.
You can also segment your customers to tailor messages and provide a customer experience that resonates with them. It’s a great way to help build relationships and establish trust with the people you reach.
Marketing Hub Starter enables your business to send designed marketing emails to lists via HubSpot editor. You can send up to five times the amount of marketing contacts you are allotted per month.
For example, if you have 1,000 contacts, you can send 5,000 marketing emails each calendar month, and you can increase these numbers as your business needs evolve.
This freedom and flexibility can be particularly beneficial for smaller companies that are just getting up and running and aren’t sure whether they’re ready to jump headfirst into more extensive email marketing campaigns.
Sales Hub Starter includes a range of tools to help manage and close deals faster - live chat, pipeline and deal management, meeting scheduling, and more. It’s also helpful for those who need to route conversations and manage tasks.
Like Marketing Hub Starter, the Sales Hub Starter option is an excellent choice for growing businesses. It provides enough tools for you to manage your workload, but not too many to become overwhelmed or confused. And, as always, you have the option to seamlessly upgrade your plan when your business grows out of it.
The Sales Hub Starter interface is easy to use, but HubSpot support is always available to answer any questions you may have about the platform. This is another reason it’s a great option for growing businesses just learning the ropes.
Here are the details of some of the key features and benefits of the HubSpot Sales Hub Starter:
With the Sales Hub Starter platform, you can create up to two deal pipelines with stages.
Maybe you need a pipeline to track new prospects and another to track post-sale upsell or cross sell opportunities. Perhaps you have two different products with entirely different sales cycles.
In either case, you can track the progression of prospects or customers across two pipelines based upon your unique process.
You’re also able to automate administrative tasks and leverage powerful insights into the health of your pipelines.
By optimizing your deal pipelines, you’ll be able to take advantage of three additional features:
HubSpot is known for its automation prowess. While it is relatively limited in Sales Hub Starter, you can take advantage by using automation to enable task notifications.
Most businesses find this kind of workflow incredibly useful, as it removes the need to track their processes manually. You can throw away all those post-it notes.
It’s also great to help streamline prospect follow-up, build consistency throughout the sales cycle, and ensure required actions are completed on time during the sales cycle.
Perhaps a gift card needs to be sent to a prospect after they complete a discovery call or an email needs to be sent to an account manager when the deal closes.
Another benefit with Sales Hub’s basic automation tool is to route and rotate conversations or leads to the appropriate salesperson.
As your prospects move through the deal pipeline, you may want to require certain information to be captured through each stage of the sales cycle.
For example, in order for a contact to be moved from marketing qualified lead (MQL) to sales qualified lead (SQL), you may want to require that the primary decision maker is identified, involved, and interested in your product or service.
Through HubSpot, you can add custom properties to contacts or companies. Once they’re created, you can make those properties required for the contact to move from the MQL stage to the SQL stage.
This drastically helps with data integrity, helps reinforce a consistent sales cycle, and ensures key objectives are followed as the prospects progress.
HubSpot provides easily reusable email and snippets to be made for a time-saving and more scalable sales process. While you certainly understand an email template, you may be wondering: what’s a snippet?
Snippets are short and reusable text blocks that can be used in emails, chat, or documentation. Within HubSpot, you can use the snippets shortcut to insert that text block quickly.
They’re especially useful to answer common questions or produce frequently used information in an email or live chat conversation.
It’s important to note that email and snippet templates are capable of including personalization tokens to ensure you’re addressing the prospect with a personalized touch.
Here are some template examples you may want to include in your sales cycle:
With HubSpot’s Meetings functionality, scheduling meetings has never been easier. No more long email threads trying to identify when everyone’s available.
Simply send your prospect or customer a link to a meeting you’ve created in your HubSpot platform.
Once recipients receive the link, they’ll be able to see your availability and quickly schedule a slot that works for everyone.
Here’s a quick look at how and why it’s so beneficial:
HubSpot’s Service Hub Starter is a customer service management solution that enables businesses to scale their customer support tools in a single platform.
Service Hub Starter is great for small businesses looking for an affordable, easy-to-use platform that enables them to easily communicate with and deliver results to their customers.
One of the benefits of Service Hub Starter from a customer standpoint is that it provides modern, convenient contact methods.
Not many customers today want to spend time waiting on the phone, but features such as live chat and ticketing make it easy for them to communicate their needs in a convenient manner.
The Service Hub Starter plan includes ticketing, live chat, shared inbox, team email, and reporting. It offers eight hours of calling, 5,000 email templates, and 1,000 personal and team meetings links.
But what exactly do these services entail, and how can they be optimized to fit your company’s needs? We cover the essentials below:
When customers have an issue, they expect to be able to contact your team and report any issues immediately.
HubSpot Service Hub Starter enables you to empower your chat functionality to receive customer service needs and provide immediate support.
There are a variety of chat service options available to you - live chat, conversational bots, custom bots, and conversation routing. By bringing these four components together, you can create a strong feedback loop capable of triaging and logging tickets no matter the issue.
When it comes to live chat, customers are becoming more and more reliant upon chat to report and solve issues they’re facing. It’s fast, convenient, and expected. HubSpot provides Slack integrations to be able to quickly pick up these conversations, too.
Conversational and custom bots are oftentimes a great way to greet customers because you can use them to triage customer requests, provide answers or help articles to frequently asked questions, or route the customer directly to a rep who can best serve them
HubSpot ticketing functionality is one of its most critical service tools. Not only is it extremely helpful for your internal teams to manage tickets through to closure, it also enables your customers to quickly report any issues they’re experiencing.
Customers expect to be able to report issues in a variety of ways - through email, chat, meetings, form submission, and beyond.
HubSpot provides customers numerous ways to submit their own requests or report them to service teams to submit. In either case, it’s important for this to be a quick process that logs the ticket in a centralized location for service teams.
With HubSpot Service Hub Starter, it’s important to configure multiple routes for tickets to be submitted to your teams. Make sure you learn from your customers and internal teams on the best ways to submit tickets and build out those routes through HubSpot.
Once a ticket is logged, it’s important to track that ticket through pipelines.
Make sure to build out a customized pipeline that aligns with your customer service process and includes the different stages a ticket would go through from submission to closure.
HubSpot’s centralized ticketing system allows service teams to view and manage support from a single location, preventing accidental negligence due to miscommunication.
Service representatives can tag tickets with customizable properties to keep them organized, and they can modify ticket properties according to ticket progression.
Additionally, with the Starter Service Hub, you’re able to create separate pipelines to manage tickets. This may come in handy if you need to route tickets to different teams based upon region, brand, product, or whatever is applicable to your business.
HubSpot provides simple automation within its Service Hub Starter platform. It’s important to use this automation to provide a better and more transparent experience to customers.
We’ve all experienced the frustration of reporting an issue to a business and not hearing any updates. Through HubSpot, you’re able to send automatic customer emails when tickets are received and closed.
Additionally, you can set up automation to generate internal notifications as tickets change status. This is extremely valuable for efficient hand-offs and visibility.
Mastering customer service takes time and the surest way to perfect it is through insightful data and dashboards.
Monitoring customer service through spreadsheets and email is a surefire way to cause friction across service teams and lose valuable learning opportunities.
Through HubSpot’s Service Hub Starter, you gain access to powerful reporting dashboards to monitor the performance of your success teams and identify areas for improvement.
When optimizing your Service Hub, it’s important to set up dashboards to track ticket volume, response times, knowledge base usage, customer feedback, rep productivity, time-to-close reports, and so much more.
HubSpot provides more than 300 customizable dashboards. You’re also able to build advanced dashboards for cross-team analysis and build focused dashboards to help teams meet their goals, like closing more tickets and reducing service wait times.
Additionally, HubSpot allows you to create fully customized reports. Perhaps there are custom data points you need to track and monitor. Service Hub enables you to create the custom properties or fields you need and turn them into reports.
Operations Hub is HubSpot’s newest hub.
The reason behind Operations Hub is relatively simple - clean and efficient data.
One of the most common pain points of CRMs - no matter the solution - is data integrity. As we’ve mentioned multiple times, the CRM is only as effective as the data allows.
Operations Hub is especially important to HubSpot because of how integral the CRM data is to powering the rest of the platform - Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub.
Operations Hub Starter makes it easy for users to sync customer data and automate business processes.
Your entire team will stay aligned with a clean, single source of truth for customer data.
Operations Hub Starter includes a handful of useful tools, including custom properties, custom field mapping, and list segmentation.
The biggest benefit to Operations Hub Starter is Custom Field Mappings.
This feature is important for companies that need to send data between databases or tools into HubSpot, such as Salesforce to HubSpot.
Once you connect the database or tool with HubSpot through an integration, Custom Field Mapping enables you to send the data from the originating source into HubSpot and map that data to a specific property.
You can map the data to either a standard HubSpot property or custom property.
HubSpot Starter Suite includes more than 150 tools. While it’s HubSpot’s entry-level tier, it can pack a big punch for young businesses and create strong internal processes and operations.
Just because it’s expansive, doesn’t mean getting started with HubSpot needs to be an overwhelming experience.
Here are some key takeaways to keep in mind:
If you have any questions about the HubSpot Starter Suite, feel free to get in touch with Revvy today. We help growing businesses get started with the platform, ensure their HubSpot platform is in line with their strategy, and their Hubs grow with their business.