Eniture Technology Blog

5 Signs You’re Paying Too Much for Your CRM (And How HubSpot Can Help)

Written by Paul Birkhead | Dec 15, 2020 4:00:00 PM

Having a great customer relationship management system (CRM) can be a huge asset to your business, but paying too much for your CRM is a huge liability. While many people think of it as little more than a digital address book, savvy business owners know that a CRM is so much more than that. Having a good CRM allows you to access a customer's information, purchase history, past customer support records, correspondence with customer service, and so much more to create an excellent inbound marketing experience. You can do all that even if those points of contact are spread out across channels.

This allows for a far superior customer experience (CX). CX is quickly becoming the most important factor in having a successful business. Customers increasingly prioritize their experience with a business over other factors and even say they're willing to pay more for better CX. That makes the CRM you choose a pretty important decision. However, just because your CRM is incredibly important doesn't mean you should overpay for it. To help you figure out if you're paying too much for your CRM, let's go over some warning signs and discuss how HubSpot can help. First things first…

What Is HubSpot?

HubSpot is a software company specializing in sales, customer service, and inbound marketing — it’s based on a customer relationship-focused approach. They're also a learning platform. They openly share their extensive knowledge on a variety of areas of business, marketing, sales, and so much more. Their expert reputation and quality courses are so impressive that their business certifications are globally recognized and industries worldwide accept them as qualifications.

Warning Signs that You're Paying Too Much for Your CRM

Small and mid-sized businesses need to be especially careful about how they allocate their resources. People throw around sayings like, "You need to spend money to make money," or, "You get what you pay for." However, these aren't so much hard and fast rules as they are general principles or guidelines. There are plenty of examples of times when they aren't true. Sometimes, throwing more money at the problem isn't the best solution. Here are some signs that you're paying too much for your CRM, why that extra money isn't benefiting your business, and how HubSpot can help.

Sign #1: Nobody Wants to Use It

A common problem for e-Commerce businesses is that they spend money on fancy tools that promise to make them money. But then nobody uses them. It could be the most powerful, state-of-the-art, effective, and profitable CRM in existence. But if it's so difficult to work with that your team just doesn't use it, then it's literally worthless to you.

How HubSpot Can Help

Articles and customers constantly rave about how easy HubSpot's CRM is to use. They're always improving usability features. Also, their recent changes to the design made it so easy to navigate that conversion rates increased. Their intuitive layout makes it a breeze and a joy to use.

Sign #2: It Can't Integrate with Other Platforms

Running a business is complex, and no single tool will ever be enough to get everything done. It requires many tools, systems, platforms, and programs to build and run a successful business properly, especially as your business grows. You'll need to use things like email, a digital calendar, social media, call software, and many others. If your CRM can't integrate with these other platforms, apps, and services, you'll be spending a lot of time going from one platform to another, with all kinds of important data spread out on them all. Also, not having them connected to your CRM means you'll be missing out on valuable analytics data. The extra time spend and the lost opportunities are part of how you might be paying too much for your CRM.

How HubSpot Can Help

HubSpot's integrations connect with many business processes. You can:

  • Contact customers
  • Schedule meetings
  • Create, send, and track the performance of emails
  • Easily gain social media insights
  • And so much more!

They believe it's important that you be able to integrate your most crucial tools with their world-class CRM. This way, you won't waste your time moving from one platform to another, entering data manually, or replicating content. You can work quickly and efficiently so you can spend less time on busy work and more time on the things that matter most.

Sign #3: It Doesn't Unite Your Sales and Marketing Teams

Your sales and marketing teams have the same goal: a successful business. When they collaborate, magic happens. If they don't work together, a company can be out 10% of their yearly revenue. If they work together in tandem, sales win rates can increase by 38%. Don't you think that both you and your CRM should make that a priority?

How HubSpot Can Help

HubSpot's CRM has features for all areas of your business, including sales and marketing. It's also designed to work seamlessly with HubSpot’s other software products, like Sales Hub and Marketing Hub. This allows your sales team and marketing team to work together from the same platform with access to the same information and have a unified plan moving forward.

Sign #4: It Doesn't Report on Which Efforts Drive Sales

Small and mid-sized businesses have to be selective about how they spend their money. They can't afford to throw away money on tactics that don't work. However, if you don't have data on what's working, how do you determine the best place for your resources?

How HubSpot Can Help

HubSpot's CRM comes with analytics reports. There are more than 90 reports to choose from, and they let you create three dashboards, each with ten reports, completely free! If you want more, you can always add their Marketing Hub to gain access to their amazing Marketing Analytics Software or Sales Hub to add Sales Reports & Performance Management. Both of these tools integrate seamlessly with their CRM and other software.

Sign #5: It Costs Money

Wouldn't it be nice to get everything you need from a CRM for free? If you're worried that a $0 price tag means cheap quality, here's a shining example to prove that sometimes, you can pay less and still get more.

How HubSpot Can Help

HubSpot's CRM is completely free! That's right — the world-class, easy-to-use CRM with industry-leading features, award-winning software integration options, and rave reviews that we've been talking about this whole time is 100% free. There's no limit on the number of users, you can have up to a million contacts. The price of $0 will never change. The paid software options easily integrate with the free CRM. They're literally made for each other. You can stick with just the CRM and pay nothing, or you can use the CRM as a great starting point.

How Much Would You Save by Switching to HubSpot?

To put the value of HubSpot's free CRM into perspective, let's contrast it with the competition. Salesforce is one of the top CRMs in the industry. Their cheapest option costs $25 a month per user. Even when you compare HubSpot's paid software to theirs, HubSpot's Enterprise Sales Hub would come to around $75,000/year for 50 users, while Salesforce's comparable Sales Cloud would be $170,400 for the same time and users. 

The Bottom Line About Paying Too Much for Your CRM

For your business to grow and reach its highest potential, you need to make savvy business decisions like not paying too much for your CRM. It also requires the best tools, data, and resources possible. HubSpot provides globally recognized expertise, award-winning products, and world-class integration and usability, all for less than the competition. The question isn't so much why should you switch to HubSpot, but why wouldn't you?

Here at Eniture, it's our mission to provide information and solutions to e-Commerce merchants to help them grow and succeed. To learn more about how we can help, please feel free to contact us today.

About Eniture Technology

Eniture Technology specializes in helping e-Commerce merchants grow by providing useful information, digital marketing services, off-the-shelf apps that solve common problems, and custom programming services. If you're interested in accelerating the growth of your online sales, please contact us. You might also enjoy this free information on the 10 reasons why you should be using HubSpot to grow your e-commerce business.