Selling HubSpot to Sales, Service and your board in 2026: A CMO’s Guide

00:10 Craig: Today's episode is all about how we can help CMOs position HubSpot with the wider business. We're going to touch on some of the common pitfalls around not just how it's positioned, but the general implementation, optimization, and ongoing management of HubSpot. We're going to talk about things such as adoption, ownership, challenges around data, and then we're going to get maybe into some comparisons with platforms such as Salesforce.

00:38 James: And we can keep it at a high level, right? So we're not going to get into the weeds of technical implementation challenges. Rather, we're going to keep it at some of the more fundamental things that could go wrong.

00:48 Craig: Yep. Let's talk about positioning with HubSpot because, obviously, the platform's moved forward significantly over the last few years. Initially, it was launched as a marketing SaaS platform, then it evolved into sales and various other hubs, more recently into service. But now, obviously, we're entering the AI era, and it's very much an AI-first platform. And I think even now, people that have worked with HubSpot, even partners of HubSpot, will still position it wrongly in my view. It's still badged as a CRM with maybe six hubs—those six hubs being marketing, sales, service, data hub, commerce, and content hub. Did I tick those boxes?

01:32 James: I'm just expecting you to get that right.

01:36 Craig: So it really is now a unified customer engagement platform, a customer platform that when everything works together and all of those different hubs are working in beautiful harmony, then it really does become a platform that compounds its value, and it is very much greater than the sum of its parts.

01:57 James: Yeah. And it's probably worth talking about why that happens in that way and why it's positioned as individual hubs. And I think that's largely because until the CRO role was invented, there's not really been an owner of all of those different functions that's going to raise the platform within the business as a solution to all of the different problems. And ultimately, if a marketing person needs a CRM and automation system, they're naturally going to position it with the benefits that they need in mind, aren't they? I know it's a growing trend that CROs are being introduced, and it's probably a good thing. But because there's not an individual that takes responsibility for that whole thing, and I'm sure we'll cover that more later, it's kind of natural that therefore it be positioned as "this is going to help me with sales optimization" or "this is going to help me with marketing automation." The bigger picture often gets missed.

02:51 Craig: Yeah. Often, I don't think people realize actually what they're getting when they buy HubSpot. And that's not damning the role of the sales reps and the people within HubSpot that do the demos, but they're not working with the platform day in, day out. They're not running rev ops teams. They understand how HubSpot works. They understand the functionality. They know the roadmap. They know what's coming. But working with it in practice is a very different thing. So I think a lot of the early stages when a demo happens, it's very focused on what are your goals, and then we'll look at individual hubs, look at the functionality, but not really thinking about how it's supporting strategy and how it's going to work in the real world.

03:35 James: Or how it can be used as an interconnected system for the entire customer journey, which is obviously what we'll talk about.

03:42 Craig: Yeah. So mostly, it's led by the marketing function, and it's marketing wanting a new platform and all the features that enable you to run your marketing operations and maybe your website. HubSpot has been actively encouraging clients to embrace the whole customer suite and take all of the hubs because the real value of the platform is in bringing everything together in one place.

04:08 James: Mhmm.

04:09 Craig: It's obviously in HubSpot's interest if customers adopt the platform more universally because they'll retain those clients for a lot longer.

04:16 James: Yeah. And the situation that we see so often, isn't it, is that the marketing team has brought HubSpot into the business, marketing gets implemented first. Sales might ultimately end up being sometimes, to be honest, dragged into a system that they've not necessarily been bought into at the buying stage and therefore, you know, that is kind of done to them rather than with them. And oftentimes, service is similar—even, you know, may even be later than that if it's suitable for the type of organization that we're working with.

04:47 Craig: Yeah. So marketers will know HubSpot. They will have an affinity with the HubSpot brand because it's been very active over the years in supporting marketers. It's very much a love brand for marketers. So when they get the opportunity to bring in a new platform, HubSpot is always, you know, part of the day one consideration set, maybe alongside Salesforce. That's important, obviously, from a marketer's perspective because they trust what they're going to get out of the platform. But then it's implemented. It's optimized. The marketers are getting real value from it. And then when it comes to the conversation around how can you get every part of the organization that touches a customer, how can you get them on board with it? Because that really, really compounds the value then in terms of the richness of data that can be utilized in the platform. That's where you hit a lot of challenges. The first being maybe the reluctance from the marketing function to say, you know, let's roll this out across the business. That's quite a big leap from taking responsibility for marketing to being the custodian of a platform that is also having a big impact on sales and service.

05:54 James: I mean, the other barrier is budgets, right? Naturally, organizations have separate distinct budgets, distinct owners for sales, marketing, and service. And service is normally the most disconnected from the other two. But I had a conversation with a prospective client the other day that kind of paints this picture. We are working with the marketing team there. We've been brought in to talk through the benefits of Sales Hub to the sales team because I think they could see what we're talking about here—the compounding benefit of all of those three different functions of a business working off the same dataset is massive. And they could see that potential. But when it came to a conversation around Sales Hub, the sales team seemed very receptive. They were almost feeling like they were missing out, which is a good thing. But when it came down to the nitty gritty of budget, the conversation was, "Well, our sales team doesn't have a budget at all." And you can see then how the internal structure of an organization may prevent that more holistic adoption of HubSpot, which is when you get the true value out of the system.

06:58 Craig: Yeah. You're also competing with the established and preferred tools often of those sales teams and service teams. So most customer service teams, in our experience, won't have joined the dots to think that, actually, HubSpot can provide a service desk and customer support.

07:16 James: And for the same reason you mentioned at the start—that HubSpot is a known quantity or it's an understood thing in the marketing world. But if someone came to us as marketers and said, "You need to be using this platform, it's called whatever," that you'd never heard of, you'd be naturally skeptical, wouldn't you? Service people know about Zendesk. They know about, probably, Salesforce. They know about some of—in our world, some of the ITSM platforms like Halo and the others, ConnectWise.

07:49 Craig: Well, it's like a disconnect with us. But it's a bit clunky, isn't it? Let's face it.

07:54 James: And, you know, you can see where there's some reluctance there. But that's why the job of a CMO is to—if they want to bring HubSpot as a platform into their business—to convince the entire group. Because if they don't, then ultimately, the benefits of the platform aren't going to be realized. Then later down the line, questions get asked around the value it's presenting. And ultimately, when we've seen this happen, haven't we, questions get raised around the value versus the cost of HubSpot. It's not a cheap platform at all. And if they don't get the value out of it for the whole business, they might lose their debt, which is so valuable to them.

08:31 Craig: Yeah. Salespeople possibly aren't using a huge amount of tech. The sales function, the field salespeople—people, you know, in those kind of more directly customer facing or prospect facing roles—they're not relying on tech as much. But the sales management side will be using tools like Pipedrive and be very wedded to something like that and be quite resistant to change. But there's so many more tools within the sales suite of HubSpot or Sales Hub within HubSpot that can really benefit not just SDRs, but those field salespeople as well, which, again, people aren't really aware of outside of marketing. So these are quite real challenges. It's not even around adoption at this stage. Just getting buy-in is the problem at this particular stage.

09:19 James: Well, let's talk about how a CMO should position HubSpot then and really focus on what that positioning should be. And as you alluded to at the start, I think the first thing is it's not a CRM with six hubs attached that should all be operated in isolation. What it is is a centralized platform that helps the entire customer journey from the very beginning with marketing all the way through to turning customers into advocates on the customer success side. And the critical thing about it is it all uses a shared dataset. True insights are really derived from the intersection between the different functions. So because HubSpot is a platform that all three of those functions can use, insights from the marketing function can help sales. Insights from the sales function can help service and vice versa across that whole piece. But a good example would be, you know, all of that vast rich engagement from a prospect in the sales cycle. There are going to be potential challenges, potential issues, roadblocks with our current platform, etc., which are going to be discussed and if used properly in HubSpot—i.e., making calls through it, logging emails, etc., keeping the data rich—can be used as a really good onboarding tool effectively for when that is passed over to service.

10:41 James: You know, that's really critical. In fact, we have a customer that is trying to do a similar thing, albeit that their service team doesn't work in HubSpot and is having to try and extract all of that data collected during the sales process, such as pain points, key stakeholders, key aims, goals, etc., manually into an Excel via Zapier. I won't save you the long story, and then handing that over to the team elsewhere. Now wouldn't it be much simpler, easier, less likely to fall over if the customer service team were also, including onboarding, working within HubSpot itself and could say, for example, use AI to summarize the record of the deal and get all of that information served up to them, you know, almost instantaneously or autonomously at least.

11:26 Craig: Yeah. It's like a timeless challenge. It's not just because we're entering this AI era. System integration has always been the trade-off between having one system that is not brilliant in every particular area compared to point solutions that are really, really feature rich and very strong from a functionality point of view. There's the trade-off between, you know, a more unified system, a single platform gives you that rich data, and it means that everyone's working on the same technology. And that, I think, going into this AI era where the ability to prepare the organization to manipulate data is going to be so much more important. So maybe it's swinging the other way now towards a single platform. The irony of that is that because of AI, there's been an explosion of new specific AI tools that have hit the market. And it's almost like we're going back maybe ten years where there was an explosion of martech and everyone was suddenly implementing nine, ten, fifteen, twenty different tools, and none of them played together.

12:34 James: The impact on AI there from an organizational perspective, and obviously most organizations now are at least considering how they can deploy and make the most of AI within their sales, service, and marketing functions, is that if you had all those disparate systems, all of them would have their own individual datasets in isolation, which on their own are no doubt valuable, but combined are a much richer source of information that can be used to inform an AI, like Breeze in HubSpot, for example. So if you think about it, if you can look at the entire journey of a customer through data in HubSpot and soon unstructured data via Data Studio, you're going to get a much richer picture of that organization's journey with your organization, or with a part of it at least, and can therefore use AI to a much greater advantage. You know, you've got much more data to feed AI, and that, as we know, is the golden rule with AI. It's rubbish in, rubbish out, basically.

13:41 Craig: Yeah. If I was a CMO, I would be getting the whole management team together, and I'd be trying to really explain the benefits of that single source of data, that richness of data, structured and unstructured data, which we'll break down some examples of shortly. And it's not just about the technology. It was not about the technology. It's about what the technology enables you to achieve. And if you've got that richness of data, your ability to execute marketing is going to be much better because now you've got the data at your fingertips that will enable you to do more personalization, which is what everyone wants to get to. That is the holy grail for marketing. Equally, from a sales perspective, you're going to have greater intelligence around your prospects, and AI will be able to potentially identify those that are more likely to buy. And that gives the opportunity for sales and marketing to collaborate better.

14:35 Craig: And from a service perspective, it's going to give you ways to, you know, manage renewals and retention much better, provide a better customer experience, turn people into advocates by identifying those that are most likely to stay with you for the long term and are really happy with the service you're providing. So that once you have that rich dataset, those things start to become more of a reality. And that hopefully builds the business case for people to think, "Well, should we continue to work with these individual platforms, individual tools, in our own function? Let's try and embrace this," what is essentially RevOps.

15:09 James: Of course, if you have a unified platform, you can instantaneously create leads on the back of your MQL generation, and therefore, the loop between sales and marketing is closed. And you can use intelligence tools like lead scoring and buyer intent to prioritize those leads that you generate so that sales actually have some incentive to follow them up. Then more of your leads are going to get followed up by sales. More of them are going to close. So sales are getting served up quality leads, and your MQLs are actually converting. You know, by connecting the different functions using technology, you're also almost merging the functions together into one. And I think that breaks down that soap opera that we see all the time.

15:53 Craig: You know, practically speaking, if you have those functions all operating in silos, you're never going to have this kind of one focus on growth. Everyone is going to maybe have different goals that aren't aligned. I mean, the best example I can think of really was a client that we worked with together where we met. We all—and this is, you know, away from technology—but we all actually worked on the same platform, but we all sat in the same office. So marketing, sales—

16:24 James: Same desk, I think.

16:25 Craig: Account management. We all sat around the same desks. So it didn't feel like we were all operating in silos. We, you know, the leadership was very strong. The team alignment and collaboration was really, really strong. Everyone got on fantastically well. It was a fast growing company, a very successful company that achieved an exit. No one really focused on their own individual roles. Everyone had their own part to play in growth, and that was very clear. But when you sit with the sales team, when you sit with the SDRs, when you sit with account managers, and you sit closely to the, you know, the support teams, you're picking everything up and you're understanding what's going on, and this is what technology enables.

17:00 James: HubSpot is the technological equivalent of that, isn't it? All being in the same place.

17:04 James: Sitting in the same office. Yeah. Effectively.

17:06 Craig: Yeah. For, you know, the mere novice of HubSpot buyers, they go through the demo, they get wowed, they really buy into the whole thing, they buy into the platforms that HubSpot serves up, sign up, you know, and then you've got access to your customer portal. You go in and you've got the setup process, and you do that. And then the expectation has been set that this is a revolutionary platform. The first thing the CEO is going to start asking a couple of months in is, "Where are the leads?" How often have we heard that? There is such a gap between switching HubSpot on and actually getting real value from it. And because the platform has grown so much, you have to have the right level of expertise to implement. And so often, people just think, yeah, they switch it on. It's still like a SaaS concept. It's not a SaaS platform anymore. It's moved way beyond that. SaaS was basically you switch it on, and then you can learn how to operate it yourself without relative level of expertise. It's much more like an enterprise software platform now that needs to be set up and optimized in the right way.

18:16 James: Ensuring that you continually evolve how HubSpot's set up is important because it changes all the time. The conversation I talked about earlier in the podcast was with somebody that already had Sales Hub, but brought it a few years ago now and set it up well at the time, but haven't touched it since. And, obviously, since then, there's been massive improvements whereby, you know, all the AI features have come in, the CPQ tool now in quoting and commerce hub. We've got prospecting agent. We've got massively improved buyer intent tools. That's all passed them by, and they could have been taking advantage of it a lot sooner. So it is about implementation and getting it right at the start, but it's also about constant evolution and making the most of the advantages that come with the new features that come out.

19:02 Craig: Yeah. And, again, the other mistake post implementation is there isn't that dedicated ongoing program of continuous improvement, and there's no ownership of that unless companies have been smart enough to invest in a revenue ops type individual or teams.

19:18 James: Or at least give that responsibility to someone and the budget to someone that doesn't officially hold that title. And if that's someone in marketing, and it benefits them for the reasons that we talked about earlier, then I'm sure many would, given the challenge, take it on.

19:32 Craig: You're going to invest in the platform. You need someone that's going to have a dedicated role focused on data. You need someone that's going to have a dedicated role focused on optimizing the different functionality. And it's tough for one person to do that, given that—

19:45 James: It's not a marketer's role.

19:46 Craig: It's not a marketer's role. No. It's a go-to-market engineer, that possibly has some experience of customer success or service operations as well.

19:57 James: I think we should touch on the data point in a little bit more detail because as we alluded to earlier, data is—it's always been the kind of lifeblood of a marketing, sales, service campaign. But now with AI, it really is hypercritical. And I think until maybe recently and probably still for most, it's been treated as kind of a yearly "we've got to clean up our data" job. "Oh, it's a bit messy. Let's delete these workflows or let's remove these old accounts." It has to be someone's day job now. It has to be—given resource and budget demands, etc.—if possible, it needs to be someone's day job or at least a distinct part of their responsibility that isn't treated as a remediation exercise every twelve to eighteen months and sometimes even longer.

20:49 Craig: Most marketing functions don't have anyone that focuses on data.

20:52 James: We're not always equipped to be able to focus on data. You know, most marketing people haven't got data science backgrounds, and we're at a point now whereby even if you don't have a fully fledged kind of data science degree, you need to be that kind of technical individual to deal with it.

21:05 Craig: And AI is going to help you manage your data, but you still have to have some dedicated focus on it on a continuous basis. I mean, years ago, I started working with an organization that actually had a data manager and a CRM team. And it's no surprise that from a demand generation perspective, they were really effective. Most organizations don't have that in place, and they just leave it to chance. And how many times have we done audits or started working with a new client? You lift the hood up to look at their CRM and the data is in a shocking state. And, you know, you've got missing properties, missing fields.

21:43 James: When that happens, I always have to follow up—why is that? Because if the data's in that much of a mess, how are they using it? Do you know what I mean? Are they using reports properly? Because how could they trust those reports that they're using if the data's in a mess? Are they even using it for, you know, campaigns? Because unless it's clean, how can they be sure the campaigns are effective?

22:02 Craig: Well, this is—you've picked up on my old gripe about campaigns. I mean, it should be an ongoing program, and therefore, if you're going to have an ongoing program, you have to have an ongoing focus on data. If it's a campaign focus, which is the reality for most, it means "we're going to run a campaign. Let's get a new set of data from whatever tool it is, run the campaign."

22:20 James: Forget about it.

22:21 Craig: Forget about it, and then come back and the data's all out of date again. There's no constant enrichment of that data. If you can't get the basics right like that, then god help you if you try and bring in signals and intent data.

22:31 James: And use AI because, ultimately, AI can only work with the data that's fed into it. And if your data's shit, what are you going to get out?

22:41 Craig: I think it's important to just explain what we mean by structured and unstructured data, which is where we're rapidly heading with HubSpot and Data Studio. So, structured data is the sort of data that will sit conventionally within properties. So your contact records, your firmographic data—emails, first name, organization, address, phone numbers, etc. But unstructured data is really where a lot of the true gold, the real nuggets are because that's emails between clients. That's recordings of conversations that your SDRs have had. It's maybe data that you can take from social, bring in from LinkedIn. Once you have all that data sitting within HubSpot and you've got AI there to interrogate that data at scale and then give you, based on some, you know, very basic prompts, the outputs that you would have craved for five years ago, it starts to really change the game of what you can achieve.

23:42 James: In order to have that unstructured data in your system, you need to be using the system across all of the functions, and you need to be using it properly. And by properly, I mean, your salespeople should be using the HubSpot dialer to call. And if you're happy with the legality in your area or you've notified the person, record that call and therefore the data goes in. They should log all of their meetings. They should ultimately help to improve the richness of the dataset for that to happen. But if we think about an example of some of the output that you mentioned there and how that could be used, for example, based on demographic, firmographic data, the kind of data that we can use is how many activities if they're done, what is the deal value, have they had previous engagement, how many stakeholders are connected to the deal. And that can tell you so much, right? But combined with hours and hours of call transcripts where they've given semantic kind of clues as to whether they plan to move forward or not, which AI can interpret, which no human, of course, could, especially twelve months after the call has happened, that can give a much more richer picture of who is most likely to close in conjunction and in combination with some of that demographic data.

25:00 James: So we've talked about some of the pitfalls. I think we've mentioned ownership. We've talked a lot about data and having that as someone's day job. The third, I think, is adoption. Ultimately, I think this draws back to the first point we were making around how a CMO should position HubSpot and how they should bring in the different functions which should be involved and look at it as a customer platform through all three of those services, not just marketing, sales, or service. And I think that's the main thing when it comes to adoption. Getting buy-in from the different stakeholders in those different functions from the off, almost building a bit of a collective buying group that is all pushing to bring HubSpot in is the first step. Because what we so often see is that marketing brings it into the business and then tries to bring sales in, often dragging them in, and service thereafter. And that's naturally going to reduce adoption because it's, like I said at the start, done to them rather than with them. And I think that's the key thing when it comes to adoption.

26:03 Craig: I think adoption, in our experience, is much easier with marketing, obviously, because they're normally the protagonists. They're the people that want to bring it in. Sales has always been a challenge trying to get salespeople to adopt CRM and use CRM. But HubSpot's finding ways to make that a lot easier.

26:21 James: Make their lives easier makes the point, right? From a salesperson's perspective, obviously, what they care about is whether they're going to get more commission. You know, if I was trying to sell HubSpot to a salesperson, which often happens, I would be thinking about the things that they think are going to help close deals quicker and get them more cash.

26:39 Craig: And often that is escaping the admin. Let's take SDRs for example. If you're going to create an SDR function, you have to invest significantly in the data and the operations and the tech to make that work. Otherwise, you find yourself in a situation where they'll quickly run out of data, or they'll spend all of their time searching up leads, trying to find contact information. And that's stopping them from getting on the phone, from emailing, from, you know, prospecting on LinkedIn. That can be a huge time saver if all of that is taken care of. It certainly removes the excuses from salespeople, which is probably your biggest challenge. And once you've done that, it leads to more effectiveness from a sales point of view. With service, the biggest challenge is trying to get them to adopt, because they'll be working with technology a lot more than the sales team. We're trying to get them to adopt a new technology, and they may be resistant to that because maybe they're so used to working with an old form of service desk or whatever it has been. So to embrace HubSpot, and maybe it's not as powerful as other service desks like some of the things that you mentioned, like Halo. So there's going to be resistance there from a service perspective. But again, you have to weigh up the pros and cons overall—having a unified platform or having something very specific that you're not able to leverage the data that sits within it.

27:59 Craig: Do you want to wrap up?

28:00 James: Well, just to recap on what we said, I think the first thing is if you're positioning as a CMO HubSpot to your organization, then don't position it just for your own benefit. Don't position it as a CRM with these several hubs. Position it as something which is going to revolutionize your entire customer journey and enable it. Secondly, you know, once you've crossed that hurdle, and hopefully you can, think about some of the bigger barriers to a successful implementation. Ownership is a big one, particularly if you've managed to convince the business that it should be a customer journey-wide implementation. You need someone that's going to oversee all of it, whether that's yourself or someone else. Ensuring that the data is right and therefore, you can adopt some of the functionality such as AI particularly is a critical step. And finally, adoption. You know, when you reach that stage, you want to be able to ensure that people use the platform properly, which is really all about bringing them in and getting their buy-in from the start. Because if they don't, then ultimately, questions are going to start to be asked about what value you're getting from the system. And if you're not using it, then it's going to be very little. And before you know it, that system's going to be ripped out and you're going to be back in your spreadsheets.

29:13 Craig: Yeah. I think for me, it's getting the whole team—when I say team, I mean the whole organization, everyone that's involved with customers—because that's where the true value is within HubSpot. Absolutely, if you just want to buy the Marketing Hub or Content Hub, it's got great value. But that's in isolation, just serving that function. The true value of HubSpot is when you've got all of those teams working together in one platform. Almost for many that do implement HubSpot, when they don't embrace the full suite, it's like buying a Ferrari and then just driving it to the shops maybe once a year.

29:49 James: Yeah. Or a Ferrari with three wheels.

29:51 Craig: Yeah. It just—you're not—you're paying for something that you're not getting the real value out of. So, yeah. So let's wrap up on that point. Good. Nice. Thanks for listening or watching the podcast. We hope you enjoyed that. If you did, help us out by subscribing or even leave us a review. Thanks again, and we'll see you next time.