Having a centralized location for your important sales and marketing data is a must, but some of the options out there are too expensive for your average SMB. HubSpot, one of the leading sales and marketing CRM platforms, offers a range of FREE tools to help any small business grow. Let's explore what you can do with Free HubSpot.

CRM: Contacts, Companies & Deals

One of the key differentiators of HubSpot is that it's built around the CRM and is rock solid for contact, company and deal management. These free CRM tools are available to all HubSpot users.

Create custom properties for your contacts, companies and deals, track your contacts from lead to customer and keep important notes and updates on your records. 

Automatically Log & Track Emails

Integrating your Gmail or Outlook inbox allows you to track emails that you've sent to or received from a contact and helps to create transparency for your team. You no longer have to cc in everyone in the company because they can check where your communications are for a given contact. 

Meeting Links for Easy Calendar Bookings

Paying for a booking tool like Calendly? You might be able to move to HubSpot and save on those fees!

Connecting HubSpot to your Google or Outlook calendar is very easy and when people book with you they automatically get added to your CRM. If they already exist in the CRM, that meeting gets logged to their contact record so you can always look back and confirm when your last meeting was.

What's more, you can identify what type of meeting took place and what the outcome was, so you can start to get simple sales meeting data. 

Live Chat

Add live chat to your site and manage it easily via your HubSpot portal. 

Already using Facebook Messenger? No prob, you can set that up via HubSpot so it shows on your site and those contacts get added to HubSpot, while still taking advantage of the Facebook Messenger chat app. 

Website Forms

You can create and embed HubSpot forms on any website that allows you to embed onto the pages. Using the HubSpot forms populates those contacts right in HubSpot so you can manage them in the portal. This is very handy so you don't have a manually move them from your CMS backend to a different management tool. 

If you add the HubSpot tracking code to your website, the tracking code has a form listener that will automatically populate non-HubSpot forms into HubSpot. This is a helpful shortcut if you're not ready to add in HubSpot forms yet but sometimes the form listener doesn't know where to match your data to so there can be gaps in what gets collected or missed in HubSpot. 

Read More: How to Pull Non-HubSpot Forms Submissions into HubSpot

Manage Your Deals & Pipelines

You don't need to pay for Sales Pro to manage your deals. HubSpot’s free sales tools give you access to one pipeline for deal management. Create, track and manage deals from first touch to Customer! 

Paid Tools: With HubSpot Sales Pro you can start to automate key elements of your sales processes. Read more about what's available in HubSpot Sales Tools. 

Create & Manage Tasks

Creating tasks associated with your contacts, companies, deals and other CRM objects is extremely helpful to follow up with the right people, at the right time. HubSpot has several areas that can prompt automated task creation to further help you streamline your day-to-day work. 

Tickets & Pipelines

Similar to the Deals Pipeline, your free HubSpot portal also has one Ticket Pipeline. This pipeline is used to track customer feedback and ensure you're working to keep your customers happy. Ticket Pipelines are a great free tool that are often underused in the portal, so go use them!

More about Service Hub: The HubSpot Service Hub has some great tools for managing (and automating!) tickets, having a customer portal, creating a public or private knowledge based, and collecting feedback via surveys and NPS forms. If you're in customer service, it's worth checking out!

Email Marketing

You can't get too fancy with the free marketing emails but you can still do a lot for a small business! Send up to 2,000 emails per calendar month to contacts in your portal. You have access to the drag and drop email editor - but your emails will have HubSpot branding at the bottom. A quick upgrade to Marketing Starter is cheap and removes that branding. 

Ads Management

Connecting your ad accounts to HubSpot lets you create and manage Google, LinkedIn and Facebook ads right in your HubSpot portal. This also allows you to use your CRM and lists for targeted ads on each of those ad platforms. 

Analytics & Reporting

Understanding the impact of your marketing efforts is crucial for making informed decisions. Free HubSpot provides some analytics and reporting tools - but they are very limited. Access to robust analytics is a key driver to upgrade to a paid solution. It's recommended that you reach out to us and chat through the reports you need and we can help you assess if you can generate them in the level you want to pay for. 

Integration with Other Tools

Free HubSpot seamlessly integrates with other popular tools and platforms, enhancing its functionality and usability. Whether it's CRM software, e-commerce platforms, or productivity tools, HubSpot's integrations allow you to create a unified ecosystem that works for your business. By connecting with CRM software, e-commerce platforms, and productivity tools, HubSpot ensures that all your essential business operations are synchronized and working together efficiently. This integration capability means you can manage customer relationships, sales processes, and marketing campaigns from a single platform, reducing the need to switch between different systems and minimizing data silos.

Whether you're a small business or a growing enterprise, HubSpot's ability to connect with other tools means you can customize your tech stack to suit your specific requirements. For example, integrating with e-commerce platforms like Shopify can help you track customer purchases and behavior, while connecting with project management tools like Asana can improve team collaboration and task management.

Common tools users can integrate within HubSpot:

• Google Suite
• Outlook/Teams
• Zoom
• MailChimp
• Salesforce
• Slack
• Calendly
• And more!

Unlocking More Features

When you move up to the paid tiers, you unlock loads of new tools in HubSpot. Learn more about what’s included with the different levels of HubSpot:

• What’s the Difference Between Marketing Starter, Pro & Enterprise?
• What’s the Difference Between Sales Starter, Pro & Enterprise?
• What’s the Difference Between CMS Starter, Pro & Enterprise?

Curious to see if the Free CRM will fit your needs? Contact us to talk about CRM options for your business and take advantage of this powerful platform to unlock your business's full potential today!