HubSpot made a number of announcements at its INBOUND 2014 event, including a CRM system and enhanced reporting features, as the company prepares to launch its IPO.
HubSpot unveiled a sales platform that includes a free CRM as well as Sidekick, a sales acceleration product designed to provide sales reps with context about prospects and customers to improve sales productivity.
The HubSpot CRM is currently in public beta for hundreds of HubSpot customers, and will be more widely available — starting with a broader group of HubSpot’s 11,500 customers — in 2015. Sidekick, which is currently available, can be used as a stand-alone product or integrated with CRMs, including HubSpot’s new CRM platform and Salesforce.
Industry reaction has been generally positive. “I’m excited to see a deeper level of integration between CRM and marketing automation and I think the offering really targets the upper small and early-enterprise clients very well,” said Ian Michiels, Principal and CEO of Gleanster Research.
While the features are fairly standard for a CRM system, David Raab, Principal of Raab Associates, noted that the integration of marketing and sales automation are attractive. “The product looked quite nice, although I think most of the features are already available in other CRM systems or add-ons,” Raab wrote on his blog. “Having them easily available in a single product is convenient, but what’s really interesting is the integration of CRM with HubSpot’s marketing features and underlying database.”
Calendar, Enhanced Attribution Reporting Among New Features
HubSpot added a number of new features to its marketing platform, including enhanced attribution and revenue reporting, campaign wizard and a content calendar.
“Our ultimate goal since we started HubSpot has been to help companies and agencies worldwide grow their business with inbound marketing,” Dharmesh Shah, HubSpot’s Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, told attendees at INBOUND 2014. “The product launches represent massive leaps in what’s possible for marketers with HubSpot’s platform, and include features that will help marketers worldwide fundamentally transform the buying experience e for their prospects, customers, and leads.”
Among the new features, Shah highlighted revenue reporting, which he called “the one metric that matters most.” The upgrade is an expansion of Revenue Reporting in HubSpot to work with a range of CRMs and tie marketing channels, content offers, and campaigns to the bottom line, he explained.
State Of Inbound 2014: Only Half Focusing On ROI
Joe Chernov, HubSpot’s VP of Content, outlined the results of the company’s State Of Inbound 2014 report at the event.
Most companies are practicing inbound marketing, and that is true of companies of all sizes. The concentration of inbound marketers peaks (93%) at companies with a marketing budget between $1 million and $5 million annually, according to the 3,570 respondents.
“Marketers are twice as likely to cite inbound as their primary source of leads as opposed to outbound,” said Chernov. “Salespeople prioritize inbound leads because they know inbound works.”
