Let's rewind the clocks back a decade, to when we first started working with HubSpot. Back then, it was a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed marketing automation platform, aimed squarely at the SME market.
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Fast forward to today, and HubSpot has hit a serious growth spurt. It's now swinging its considerable weight around the enterprise playground, trying to take on established players like Salesforce.
And it’s doing so from a position of strength. Because while most people still labour under the misguided perception that HubSpot is a) just a marketing tool and b) is strictly for small fry, that couldn't be further from the truth.
Plenty of huge organisations are catching onto the fact that a consolidated customer platform that's actually usable, might be a much smarter shout than those heavily customisable (but clunky as fuck) enterprise monstrosities.
In reality, the functionality that HubSpot offers compared to Salesforce is like-for-like. But HubSpot is a much more usable platform, meaning your people are going to be able to take greater advantage of that functionality. What’s the point in having a powerful system if half the team doesn't know how to use it, and the other half takes an age to get anything done?
We know of several large organisations who implemented the first generation of enterprise marketing technologies, but they just sit there unused by the vast majority of sales and marketing people, working across the business.
Throw in the fact that HubSpot is considerably less expensive than these older platforms (in terms of implementation, licensing, and maintenance) and you can see why HubSpot is primed to start replacing them.
Built, not cobbled
Another major HubSpot advantage over platforms like Salesforce, Oracle Eloqua and Adobe Marketo, is it's been purposefully built, from the bottom up - rather than a bolted together menagerie of acquired systems.
HubSpot, as they put it, has been "built, not cobbled". And to be fair, they've got a point - Salesforce (and many of the other big players) will try to sell you on having a unified system, but most of its products are bought-in and then integrated into the core CRM.
For example, Salesforce Marketing Cloud - which used to be called ExactTarget before it was acquired by Salesforce in 2014 - requires you to set up an integration to make it work with the core CRM. This means you end up with just as much dicking about as you would if you were to integrate Salesforce CRM with a third-party system (because essentially, it is one).
Not HubSpot though. From day one, it's drilled into users that the "Hub" part isn't just meaningless marketing bollocks - it means your entire operation (CRM, CMS, Marketing, Sales, Service, Operations, and Commerce) is unified and centralised within a single, joined-up system, which has been built by HubSpot. So, no more stitched together, unreliable integrations between different products and components.
But what does that actually mean for you day-to-day?
Amongst a thousand other things, it means the ability to seamlessly personalise your website experience using data from your CRM. It means automating your onboarding processes as soon as the deal is signed, because your CX and sales teams are operating from the same unified system.
And it means being able to accurately analyse your return on marketing investment without any awkward integrations screwing up the data flow. Basically, your marketing, sales, and customer service teams will work better together, and your customers will get a more seamless experience.
Another key benefit is that new features, such as HubSpot's array of AI-enabled tools, are much easier to adopt. They can just be switched on, rather than having to set-up a whole new implementation project.
These are just some of the eye-catching benefits on the surface. Once you're fully bought into HubSpot's unified model, the value-adds just keep coming.
It’s not how big your stack is, it’s how you use it
The fact that HubSpot’s centralised approach is so logical, does make you ask questions about the whole notion of a tech stack.
For instance, why do we obsess about having a tech stack in the first place? Why do some people participate in awards, such as 'The Stackie Awards' that celebrate the size of their stacks? You know what they say, 'Big tech stack, small...'
Also, why does your CFO keeping giving you dirty looks in the office? Could it be because her bum squeaks violently every time she receives yet another software vendor invoice?
And why do we keep talking about "Martech", "Salestech", and "Servicetech", while in the same breath we are calling for no silos and better collaboration?
This might all explain why HubSpot’s rise to the top hasn’t been quicker.
But look, integrating different applications and tools can absolutely be valuable. But in reality, we should be aggressively consolidating and shrinking our tech stacks, not rampantly expanding them into big hairy ecosystems.
Bigger tech stacks just mean more integration headaches, more overlapping functionality, more scorched earth in terms of wasted costs, more browser tabs, more passwords, more people with niche skills needed, more payments to different vendors, more complexity. Basically, more fucking hassle than is really necessary.
The way forward
Rather than a gigantic and disparate stack, the more elegant solution is to use a truly unified system like HubSpot, as the core customer platform. Then, only integrate additional tools that play nicely and genuinely extend the core functionality.
Furthermore, a centralised system naturally supports alignment between marketing, sales and service - removing the silos that negatively impact the customer experience, and indeed revenue growth.
The very concept of "Martech" implies that marketing tech and teams should be arbitrarily separated from their sales and customer service counterparts (and vice versa). We're all aware of the importance of greater collaboration these days. So why are we still creating barriers like this across the customer journey?
HubSpot has seen the light and is leading the charge on driving much needed change. They predicted that eventually people would get hacked-off with the big, cumbersome, and poorly-integrated enterprise platforms of old and will want something they can use across the business - not just in Marketing Operations. As more organisation's come to realise there’s a different way of doing things, HubSpot’s rise to the top of the enterprise software world will become a reality.
