What is HubSpot Used For? 7 Benefits and Uses for B2B Companies

Do you look at your competitors and wonder how they’re attracting leads, closing deals, and supporting customers with what looks like such ease?

The answer might just be a powerful secret weapon: HubSpot.

Disjointed marketing, sales, and customer service efforts aren’t enough to cut it in today’s marketplace. If you want to crush your goals and own your vertical, you need to be a forward-thinking company, which means ditching your duct-taped tech stack and embracing an all-in-one platform.

But what exactly can HubSpot do for your business? This post peels back the curtain on 7 key benefits and uses of HubSpot that are transforming marketing for B2B companies. Whether you're a HubSpot newcomer or looking to maximize your existing investment, get ready to unlock the full potential of your platform.

What is HubSpot Used For? The Basics

Let’s start with the basics. What is HubSpot?

HubSpot is a comprehensive customer relationship management (CRM) platform designed to help businesses attract, engage, and delight customers. It offers a suite of tools that integrate marketing, sales, customer service, and operations functions.

This platform is particularly well-suited for small—to medium-sized businesses looking to scale their operations and larger enterprises seeking to streamline their customer-facing processes. HubSpot is a flexible solution that works for a variety of industries from tech and SaaS to professional services and more.

HubSpot offers different "Hubs" or modules, each focusing on specific aspects of business operations. Let’s examine each of these:

Marketing Hub: This hub is all about inbound marketing and lead generation. It includes tools for content creation, social media management, email marketing, and lead nurturing. Businesses use this to attract visitors, convert them into leads, and nurture those leads into customers.
Sales Hub: HubSpot Sales Hub focuses on sales acceleration, pipeline management, and deal closing. It provides tools like email tracking, meeting scheduling, and deal tracking to help sales teams manage their processes more efficiently and close deals faster.
Service Hub: This hub is dedicated to customer support, service delivery, and retention. It includes ticketing systems, customer feedback tools, and knowledge bases, helping businesses provide better customer service.
CMS Hub: This hub offers tools to build and manage a website without extensive technical knowledge. It integrates seamlessly with other HubSpot tools, making it easy to create personalized website experiences for your visitors and target customers.
Operations Hub: This hub focuses on data synchronization, workflows, and business process management. It helps keep data clean and synced across systems, automates time-consuming tasks, and provides tools for more efficient operations.
Commerce Hub: Designed for e-commerce management and online sales, this hub helps businesses sell online more effectively, manage orders, and create a better buying experience.

When it comes to pricing, HubSpot offers a range of options to suit different business needs and sizes. They have a free tier with basic functionality then paid tiers (Starter, Professional, and Enterprise) for each hub, with increasing features and capabilities at each level. Businesses can use one hub or combine multiple hubs based on their needs.

Pro-Tip: If you want to get the most of your HubSpot experience and investment, you need to invest in proper onboarding. While the platform is user-friendly, it's also feature-rich and can be complex. A thoughtful onboarding process ensures that your team understands how to use the tools effectively and aligns the platform with your specific business processes. This initial investment in learning and setup can significantly impact the long-term success and ROI of using HubSpot.

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Use #1: Inbound Marketing and Lead Generation

HubSpot has a whole suite of tools and a whole host of uses. The first and most common use for HubSpot is for inbound marketing and lead gen. Most of HubSpot’s tools combine and work together to help you attract, engage, and convert your visitors into qualified leads.

Let’s examine how.

With Marketing Hub, you can create SEO-optimized blog content that attracts organic traffic to your website. The platform offers tools for keyword research, on-page SEO optimization, and content strategy planning, helping you create content that resonates with your target audience and ranks well in search engines.

Once visitors land on your site, you can use HubSpot's landing page builder and form tools to capture their information. These easy-to-use tools allow you to create landing pages and forms without needing extensive technical or coding knowledge.

Hubspot also helps you nurture leads with automated email sequences. You can set up triggered emails based on user actions or characteristics, ensuring that each lead receives relevant, timely content that moves them further down the sales funnel.

One of Marketing Hub's most powerful features is its ability to track lead behavior and engagement across multiple touchpoints. Whether a lead visits your website, opens emails, or interacts with your social media posts, HubSpot captures this data, giving you a 360-degree view of each lead's journey.

Finally, you can use all your HubSpot data to score your leads. You can automatically identify your most engaged and sales-ready leads by assigning points for different actions. When a lead reaches a certain score threshold, HubSpot can automatically notify your sales team or pass the lead directly to your CRM.

Use #2: Sales Pipeline Management and Deal Closing

Another key use for HubSpot is sales pipeline management. HubSpot's Sales Hub is designed to streamline your sales processes, making it easier for your team to manage relationships, track deals, and close more business.

At the core of Sales Hub is a powerful, centralized CRM where you can manage all your contacts and companies. This tool gives your entire team a single source of truth for customer data, ensuring everyone is working with the most up-to-date information.

One of Sales Hub's standout features is its customizable pipeline management. You can set up your deal stages to match your unique sales process and easily track deals as they move through these stages. This visual representation of your pipeline makes it easy to see where deals are getting stuck and where you need to focus your efforts.

Sales Hub also includes robust email tools to help your team stay on top of prospect interactions. You can track when emails are opened and clicked and even set up notifications to alert you when a hot prospect engages with your content.

Another key feature of Sales Hub is its automated follow-ups and reminders. You can set up sequences of emails to nurture prospects and create tasks to remind you to reach out at just the right time. Sales Hub also helps you generate quotes and contracts within the platform.

Finally, Sales Hub provides powerful analytics tools to help you analyze your sales performance and forecast future revenue. You can see which activities are driving the most results, identify your top performers, and more.

Use #3: Customer Service and Retention

Another key use for HubSpot takes us further down the funnel to customer retention. HubSpot's Service Hub is designed to help you deliver incredible customer support and maintain strong customer relationships. Let’s take a look at some of the features and functions of Service Hub.

First, you have Service Hub’s ticketing system. This system allows you to manage and track customer inquiries, helping you avoid letting customer issues fall through the cracks. You can route tickets to the right team members, set priorities, and track resolution times to ensure you're meeting your service level agreements.

Service Hub allows you to create a comprehensive knowledge base to empower your customers and reduce the load on your support team. This self-service option enables customers to find answers to common questions on their own, improving their experience and freeing up your team to handle more complex issues.

Welcome to the modern age! You can also use Service Hub’s chatbots for more immediate customer service. You can set up chatbots to handle frequently asked questions, freeing up your human agents to focus on more complex issues. When a query is too complex for the bot, it can seamlessly route the conversation to a human agent.

One of Service Hub's most powerful features is its proactive outreach tools. You can set up automated check-ins based on customer milestones or behaviors and deliver personalized content to help customers get the most out of your product or service.

With these key uses in mind, let’s take a look at some of the benefits you can enjoy when you implement HubSpot as a B2B company.

Benefit #1: Unified Dashboards

One of the biggest benefits of HubSpot is its ability to centralize your tools and processes into one system. This capability extends to reporting, and HubSpot allows you to create unified dashboards that give you a 360-degree view of your business, marketing, and sales processes.

Some benefits you can enjoy from unified dashboards are:

Better team alignment: Every team member has access to the same up-to-date information, ensuring consistent messaging and strategy across all customer interactions.
More personalized communications: You can tailor your outreach based on a prospect's entire history with your company, not just their most recent interaction. For B2B companies, where relationships are often long-term and multi-faceted, this level of personalization can be a game-changer.
Better understanding of the customer journey: See how prospects move through your pipeline, which touchpoints are most effective, and where potential bottlenecks occur.

Comprehensive dashboards support improved account-based marketing and sales strategies. By having all account information in one place, you can more effectively target key decision-makers and tailor your approach to each account's specific needs and characteristics.

Benefit #2: Scalable Automation

Another key benefit of working with HubSpot is their marketing automation capabilities. Using HubSpot automation, you can scale your operations without sacrificing personalization. Let’s take a look at some areas you can use HubSpot’s automation tools:

Lead nurturing: Set up automated email sequences that deliver the right content to the right prospects at the right time, keeping them engaged throughout long B2B sales cycles.
Automated task assignment: HubSpot can automatically assign leads to the appropriate sales rep based on predefined criteria, and set up reminders for follow-up actions, keeping your sales process moving smoothly.
Customer communication: Set up automated touchpoints that keep your customers informed and engaged throughout their journey with your company.

By automating routine tasks, your team can focus on high-value activities like building relationships, strategizing, and closing deals.

Benefit #3: Easy Data Access

HubSpot’s centralized tools offer some critical benefits when it comes to data access. The built-in reporting and analytics features give your business the insights you need to optimize your efforts.

Some key reporting areas include:

Marketing ROI: HubSpot allows you to track the performance of your marketing efforts from first touch to closed deals, giving you a clear picture of which strategies are driving the most value for your business.
Sales pipeline forecasting: See how deals are progressing, identify potential blockages, and make more accurate revenue predictions. This feature is particularly valuable for B2B companies with long, complex sales cycles.
Customer engagement tracking: Track how prospects and customers are interacting with your website, emails, and other content. This insight can help you refine your content strategy and identify upsell or cross-sell opportunities.

HubSpot's analytics provide data-backed insights for continual improvement of processes and strategies. By clearly seeing what's working and what's not, you can iteratively refine your approach, becoming more efficient and effective over time.

Benefit #4: Integration and Customization

Finally, a good deal of HubSpot’s magic lies in its flexibility and integrations. You can use HubSpot to create a customized ecosystem that fits your business’s specific needs. You can also adjust your tech stack and integrations over time to suit your changing needs as your business grows.

One key benefit is seamless integration with existing CRM, ERP, or other business systems. You can leverage HubSpot's powerful features without disrupting your existing workflows or losing access to important historical data.

HubSpot is also highly customizable to fit specific B2B processes and workflows. Whether you need custom fields, unique pipeline stages, or specific automation rules, HubSpot can be tailored to match your business processes.

The platform is extensible through HubSpot's App Marketplace for functionality not natively available in HubSpot. This ecosystem of third-party integrations allows you to add specialized features or connect with niche tools specific to your industry or use case.

What is HubSpot Used For? Get The Most From Your HubSpot Environment

Reviewing the uses and benefits in this post should give you a clear picture of what HubSpot is used for. It’s more than a CRM — it’s an all-in-one tool suite made for startups, scaleups, and growing businesses.

Using HubSpot, your team can attract and nurture leads, close deals, and support customers. The tool’s integrations and features can help you streamline operations and make better, data-driven decisions for your business.

But only if you know how to use it properly.

HubSpot's power lies in its versatility and depth of features. That means that, without the right guidance, you might only be scratching the surface of what HubSpot can do for you.

That's where HubSpot onboarding partners come into play. The right onboarding partner can help you find the best ways to leverage its tools for your specific business needs. They can help you:

Set up your HubSpot environment correctly from the start
Integrate HubSpot with your existing tools and processes
Train your team on best practices for using the platform
Develop strategies to maximize your ROI from HubSpot
Troubleshoot issues and optimize your usage over time

Ready to unlock the full power of HubSpot for your business? Don't leave your success to chance. Schedule an onboarding call with our HubSpot experts today. We'll help you map out a strategy to make HubSpot work for your unique business needs.

Or, if you prefer to start exploring on your own, check out our comprehensive onboarding resources. They're packed with valuable insights and step-by-step guides to help you get up and running with HubSpot.

Mallory is a Growth Marketer at Lean Labs, working with brands to ignite their growth engine through conceptualizing, implementing, and optimizing growth marketing strategies.

10 Min Read

HubSpot

Oct 22, 2024