A Breakdown of HubSpot CRM Free Features & Limitations in 2024 - Financesonline.com (2024)

One of the typical problems with sales is the abundance of disparate data. Campaign feedback, customer conversations, lead profiles, performance indicators of sales reps and other important customer data reside in different databases and devices. Without a proper view of such data, you’re missing out on potential opportunities and glossing over weak points and bottlenecks in your sales process.

Like any good CRM, HubSpot captures all essential data in an organized way, which helps in nurturing leads and ultimately improving your conversion rate. In general, it consolidates sales and marketing data to help you see a clearer picture of your critical metrics such as sales cycle, lead velocity, lead quality, close rates, and customer profiles.

Two standout qualities are what make HubSpot CRM different from similar apps: it’s free and it’s simple. In our breakdown of HubSpot CRM free features, you’ll find out how the tools can improve your sales team’s productivity and efficiency despite being offered at no cost. This tool can actually help your business grow, especially since research indicates that CRM tools can boost sales by 29% and productivity by 34%.

As for simplicity, HubSpot CRM is the kind of tool that you can understand, set up, and start using in a matter of minutes. The UI is clean and designed around a sales rep’s typical daily busywork: entering contacts, associating them with deals, plotting them on a sales pipeline, calculating their value … except that now, these are automated with rules.

Unlike complex CRMs like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics, which are technology-driven and the reason why a CRM can be problematic with impatient sales reps, HubSpot CRM is problem-solution oriented, addressing the common pain points of sales reps and teams.

What companies will benefit from HubSpot CRM?

If you don’t have a CRM system in place yet, getting HubSpot CRM is a good start. It’s primarily intended for sales reps and SMBs looking for efficiency in their sales processes.

Or, if you’re underutilizing a complex platform, HubSpot can get your CRM going. In fact, HubSpot CRM doesn’t aim to dislodge Salesforce from the top spot; rather, it’s well designed to complement it. Salesforce has rich enterprise functionality, deep analytics, case management, and reporting, but they’re geared towards the sales manager or director of large sales departments. HubSpot CRM, on the other hand, wants to assist sales reps and teams to improve their productivity.

In many cases, small and medium-sized businesses will find in HubSpot all the CRM tools they’ll need.While HubSpot is not the only free CRM software that you can find out there, it’s by far the best one, so we recommend you start your journey with the tool and then compare it to other alternatives.

What HubSpot CRM features are you getting for free?

As mentioned above, all HubSpot CRM features are available for free, and they consist of five major sections:

1. Dashboards
2. Contacts
3. Companies
4. Deals
5. Tasks

Plus a bunch of sales tools. Here’s a breakdown of each group of features:

Dashboards

It’s a collection of reports that lets you track prospect interactions and deals in one location for quick visibility. The free app gives you basic reports for deal forecast showing:

• Total deal value per stage
• Sales performance indicating contacts and deals assigned to reps
• Productivity highlighting the total number of calls
• Notes, meetings, and tasks done in a given time period
• Deals closed vs. goal and recent activity.

The free dashboard can be spruced up with add-ons for a fee, which allows up to 200 dashboards, access to a custom builder, leaderboards, funnel analytics, detailed forecasts, and engagement rates.

Contacts

This section allows you to sort customer and lead details from over a hundred fields. You can view contacts in a way that is meaningful to your sales team. The fields range from sales stage to deal ownership, demographics, social media, activity, email information, and analytics history. As if that’s not enough, you get to add your own fields by creating properties.

HubSpot CRM allows you to enjoy up to one million contacts with no expiration date for free. But as we mentioned earlier if you’re also using HubSpot Marketing, you may be charged with $100 per month for each additional batch of 1,000 contacts you import to CRM. That’s because the contacts you add in the CRM are synced with HubSpot Marketing, so you’re actually paying for the Marketing tool. The CRM stays free.

Do you need HubSpot Marketing? Yes, if you want to accelerate inbound lead cycle and automate much of your marketing process. It will drive sales-qualified leads to your CRM so you can jumpstart your sales cycle. You can read our detailed review of HubSpot Marketing to learn more about the features it offers.

But you’re also good to go with HubSpot CRM alone given that you already have substantial leads in the pipeline and you can consider moving to HubSpot Marketing later down the line.

Companies

This section acts in the same manner as Contacts, but instead of a person’s name, it lists the company name. Similar to Contacts, when you click on an item, it opens to an interface showing all relevant details about it. Apart from the basic contact information, you’ll see an activity stream, emails, calls, tasks, notes, schedule, deals, and related contacts. Using Contacts and Companies means your sales rep can see all related data in one place and perform next-step actions like sending an email or making a call straight out of the same interface.

Deals

This is where you view deals across a visual pipeline. You can add stages and define the terminology and configure a pipeline that best reflects your prospects’ buyer journey. One of the most useful features of Deals is configuring the closing probability with a slider. This makes calculating the conversion rate per stage a simple task, which is one of the requirements should you want to increase profits by reverse engineering your revenue goals.

You can also sort deals via a variety of filters including name, owner, amount and stage, and get the intel for your next step. Likewise, you can view this section by table or board layout.

Tasks

This section puts in one place all tasks and their associated records like deals, contact details, and activities. HubSpot CRM lets you categorize tasks in seven ways:

1. Assigned to
2. By association
3. Due date
4. Reminder
5. Task type
6. Title
7. Status

You can also view tasks depending on where they are on the sales pipeline by simply clicking the board layout. This is practical and helps product and sales reps take action, for instance, seeing a task near to the last stage as placing a follow-up call.

Sales tools

HubSpot CRM also comes with loads of free sales tools you’ll find in HubSpot Sales, one of the best sales software for businesses today. When you use the CRM app, you’ll be actually using some of these Sales features as well:

1. Snippets. It saves prewritten replies to common questions for live chat or part of an email. The free app allows for up to 5 snippets per account.
2. Templates. It lets you create standard email replies to prospects. The free CRM allows up to 5 templates only.
3. Documents. It tracks email attachments, giving you insight on who interact with your content and for how long. You get 5 documents for free.
4. Meetings. A personal widget that allows prospects to schedule a meeting with you via a “meeting link.” Only 1 link is allowed in the free app.
5. Notifications. You get up to 200 notifications on prospects who click a link in your email.
6. Calling. For up to 15 minutes per user/month.

How can HubSpot CRM features benefit your sales team?

Using HubSpot CRM will make your sales team function with more coordination, insights, and transparency. In general, this app will help you with:

1. Organized sales process. You get a clean, visual sales funnel that shows you the most recent activities and events of your sales team. It’s also easy to sort deals, appointments, and contracts made at any time period from one location. Likewise, using filters you can sort deals by owner, name, amount or stage. Related records are also associated to give context to a deal, prospect, or customer.
2. Measurable metrics. Sales stages are configured to your exact process, they have clear close rates, and you can track a sales rep’s performance versus quota. The free CRM provides dashboard visual ticklers on your most important sales numbers, such as sales cycle length, lead velocity, deal size, and conversion rate.
3. Conversion triggers. Deals are qualified with clear sales criteria. The CRM brings into view the deal’s timeline and associates it with relevant records. This provides you an insight into what motivates a conversion and allows you to set rules and calculate close rates in each stage.
4. Automation. Manual workflows can be automated with rules, such as lead scoring, email sequences, reminders, adding contact details, calculating total close rates
5. Reminders. You can set alerts for follow-ups and schedule meetings across various communication touchpoints like phone, email, and live chat. One valuable tool in this free CRM allows you to create a follow-up task by ticking a checkbox that pops up after sending an email or placing a call. This ensures that no sales rep will be sitting on a deal. Follow-ups keep everything moving forward.
6. Track buyer’s journey. With a clear sales pipeline and associated records, sales reps can follow a prospect’s journey from lead to conversion and identify at each stage his needs, deal value, and conversations. This aids sales reps to focus their selling on what’s important to the prospect at a particular sales stage.

How to get started with HubSpot CRM

HubSpot CRM free features are impressive; for these features, the software occupies the top spot of our 20 best CRM solutions today. Creating a free account if very easy and straightforward. The first step is to sign up for a HubSpot CRM free app and you’ll be ready to start improving your team’s work in just a few minutes.

After downloading the app, you can set up the CRM and import your leads and contacts. You can also start configuring the sales stages to your workflows.Gather around your sales team and explain the HubSpot features so everyone is on the same page. The next step is to use it for a month and see how your sales team has improved.

Key Insights

• Free HubSpot CRM Features: HubSpot CRM provides essential tools for managing customer relations, including contact and lead management, deal tracking, and sales performance monitoring, all at no cost.
• Data Consolidation: HubSpot CRM consolidates disparate data into an organized format, helping to identify potential opportunities and address weak points in the sales process.
• User-Friendly Interface: The CRM is designed for ease of use, allowing users to set up and start using the tool within minutes.
• Sales Productivity: Research indicates that using CRM tools like HubSpot can boost sales by 29% and productivity by 34%.
• Target Audience: HubSpot CRM is ideal for sales reps and SMBs looking to improve efficiency and productivity in their sales processes.
• Complementary Tool: HubSpot CRM can complement more complex platforms like Salesforce, offering a user-friendly interface for sales reps while supporting the broader functionality needed by large sales departments.
• Feature Breakdown: Key free features include dashboards, contacts, companies, deals, tasks, and various sales tools like snippets, templates, documents, meetings, notifications, and calling.
• Benefits for Sales Teams: The CRM helps organize the sales process, provides measurable metrics, identifies conversion triggers, automates workflows, sets reminders, and tracks the buyer’s journey.
• Easy Setup: Creating a free HubSpot CRM account and setting up the tool is straightforward, enabling quick improvements in sales team performance.

FAQ

1. What do you get with free HubSpot CRM? With free HubSpot CRM, you receive tools to manage contacts and leads, track deals, monitor sales performance, and utilize live chat and task management features. It consolidates data to help improve customer relations and sales processes.
2. What makes HubSpot CRM different from other CRMs? HubSpot CRM stands out because it is free and user-friendly. It is designed to be easily understood and set up within minutes, addressing common pain points for sales reps and teams.
3. Who will benefit from using HubSpot CRM? Sales reps and small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) looking to enhance their sales processes will benefit the most. It is also suitable for those who need a simpler alternative to more complex CRM systems like Salesforce.
4. How does HubSpot CRM help in improving sales team productivity? The CRM organizes the sales process, offers measurable metrics, identifies conversion triggers, automates workflows, and provides reminders and tracking of the buyer’s journey, all of which contribute to increased sales team productivity.
5. What are the key free features of HubSpot CRM? Key free features include dashboards, contact management, company management, deal tracking, task management, and several sales tools such as snippets, templates, documents, meetings, notifications, and calling.
6. Can HubSpot CRM be used with other marketing tools? Yes, HubSpot CRM can be used alone or integrated with HubSpot Marketing for additional functionality, such as accelerating inbound lead cycles and automating marketing processes.
7. How do I get started with HubSpot CRM? You can get started by signing up for a free account, downloading the app, setting up the CRM, and importing your leads and contacts. Configure the sales stages according to your workflows and begin using the tool to improve your team’s performance.