Rightly said by Dean Kamen, “Every once in a while, a new technology, an old problem, and a big idea turn into an innovation.”
Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, the co-founders of HubSpot, proved the above statement true by changing the way of buying and selling products online. It goes back to when they realized that people get irritated with the companies who bid for their attention and end up blocking the ways for a salesperson to reach them. That’s when HubSpot came into being.
HubSpot Startup
Talking of HubSpot, the game started with Inbound Marketing, an approach that was solely focused on grabbing the attention of people without making them feel interrupted by the salespeople. As of today, 76% of organizations are using inbound marketing as the primary approach to fuel their business productivity.
Over the years, HubSpot platform grew from just being an inbound marketing tool to a powerful growth engine.
Do you think that it would have been that easy a journey? Not to hurt you, but it takes around the clock routine and a lot of sweat to build something big.
Attracting customers and setting the business graph to go up is not a cakewalk. HubSpot started its business in 2006 with three customers, and the number has constantly been rising since then.
You will be amazed to know that HubSpot generated a revenue of almost $29 million in 2011, which jumped to nearly $53 million in 2012. Woah!! In just a year. Keeping profits aside, it started by focusing on targeting small organizations.
HubSpot's Growth Journey
Now, let’s go through HubSpot’s incredible growth journey from a marketing tool to a growth platform.
Marketing Platform
HubSpot started as an email marketing platform, which transformed into a marketing strategy. In 2013, HubSpot added a content management strategy (CMS) that allows the users to create and manage the website effortlessly. The best part about this incredible marketing tool is that both techies and non-techies can build excellent and personalized websites.
HubSpot platform didn’t limit its service offering to the CMS tool; the invention and innovation process is on-going.
On September 16, 2014, HubSpot launched a free CRM tool to help organizations sell faster, better, and efficiently. CRM stands for customer relationship management, which is built for the modern sales team and connects with Apple Mail, Outlook, Google Apps, Gmail, etc., automatically and quickly.
HubSpot CRM features a database of deals, contacts, companies, and tasks to help both customer-facing teams to view, manage, and navigate the contacts, leads, and chat opportunities from one centralized place. It allows the sales team to record calls, track emails, manage data, etc. and create a unified customer experience.
Also, the real-time notification feature of HubSpot CRM allows the users to know how, when, and where to engage the prospects. It is currently available for free and has become the best tool for the companies who just stepped into the business world.
Considering the growing interest of organizations, HubSpot marketing platform added ten other brand features on September 17, 2014.
It was not only to help the other companies grow their business but also to assist the HubSpot management in seeing an uplift in their business revenue and potential customers. The list of features that makes the product more productive includes:
- Attribution reporting
- Branching in Workflows
- Expansion of Revenue Reporting
- Content Calendar
- Anonymous Personalization
- Campaign Wizard
- Suggestion streams within Social media
- Email Optimizer
- Email Dashboard
- List Analytics
The improvements in the HubSpot marketing platform captured more customers and empowered business growth by 51%. Also, by 2015, the HubSpot CRM marketing platform accelerated the revenue and customer growth to 53% and 35%, respectively.
To extend the power of HubSpot, the team announced integrations with different technology partners on May 19, 2015, including SlideShare, Bigcommerce, HelloSign, BrightInfo, Invoca, DataHero, Perfect Audience, and Shopify. By introducing integrations, HubSpot was able to increase its efficiency and generate more leads.
Transformation of Marketing Tool to Suite
To grow better with the right plan and upgrade the business, HubSpot transformed its marketing tool to a suite bundle that includes not only marketing and CRM but also services. It acts as an efficient tool that helps the organizations to perform various tasks from one unified view.
The suite is a complete package, including Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, and Services Hub. The primary objective of transforming the HubSpot growth platform into a suite/bundle is to provide greater flexibility, more control, and deeper insights into the advanced team and enhance business productivity.
In September 2017, HubSpot launched Service Hub to scale its business and help teams stay connected. By launching this product into HubSpot, it becomes easy for the companies to engage more customers, automatically generate tickets, provide support via a knowledge base, etc.
To fuel the business growth, HubSpot started paid services and offered premium services in the form of marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub.
Earlier, HubSpot used to operate its business based on the funnel, but now, it has adopted the flywheel approach where customers are the main focus. Flywheel approach allows the organization to turn their visitors into buyers and then into promoters quickly.
When HubSpot transforms from a marketing tool to a suit, they offer a whole stack of products for marketing, sales, and services, including CRM, making it more powerful and making business life much easier.
Then, HubSpot launched its Enterprise growth suite bundle on September 5, 2018, which included advanced capabilities to achieve the business goals and grow mutually.
The enterprise offerings update the marketing, sales, and service hub enterprise for a discounted price. Earlier, HubSpot started with a small but growing company, but now, it has become a suite that makes the product better and stronger than before.
HubSpot- A Growth Platform
If we look at the current stage of HubSpot, it is basically a growth platform that is ready to plug in all the favorite tools. Now, it allows the users to easily track the entire journey and close deals to happy customers.
The transformation of the HubSpot suite to a growth platform was done on September 4, 2019. On this day, HubSpot expanded its functionality and announced new features that allow the customers to enjoy greater reliability, more sophisticated user experience, and smarter processing than before.
Now, the HubSpot tool is available for starters, professional, and enterprise users that allow the users to add value for a growing team.
To make the tool more engaging and powerful, HubSpot adds LinkedIn lead generation forms creation to Free HubSpot CRM on October 21, 2019, which helps users collect quality leads from the all-in-one HubSpot platform quickly.
As per the research conducted by HubSpot, it is evaluated that around 88% of customer service professionals believe that the expectations of customers are more than before.
Therefore, one can consider HubSpot as a growth platform as one can perform various activities, manage various tasks, and gain a full view of the customer experience from one centralized place.
It allows the users to build a target audience, creates lead generation forms, automatically syncs leads generated on LinkedIn to HubSpot, Report on advertising ROI with precision, Manage and report on ads across social media platforms, Align ad campaigns syncwith other marketing activities, etc. By using the advanced features, a business can easily grow.
No doubt, the powerful new features of HubSpot makes it a growth platform. But, still, there is a lot more to come.
The bottom Line
So, if you want to put your shoes into a great platform that not only makes the business tasks effortless but also has a great scope in the future, then HubSpot marketing platform stands at the top. It’s excellent features, and seamless integrations make it a growth platform.
Are you still having second thoughts? Feel free to ask.
Furthermore, if you want to invest in HubSpot a growth platform, you can contact us 24*7. Our HubSpot experts are there to help you out to reach your business goals.
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