When HubSpot is Not Right for Your Business

HubSpot is a really powerful marketing automation software that has provided great results for many businesses, but simply implementing the product is often not enough for many companies. If you are struggling to make HubSpot work for you, I want to let you know that you are not alone.

It's important to take sometime to understand where things are breaking down for your company, there are a few common areas where people tend to get tripped up. So we've compiled a few ways for you to know when HubSpot might not be right for your business:

1. There's too much to manage!

Let's face it, the idea of HubSpot and inbound marketing sounds great, but once you dive into it you realize — man, it's a lot of work! From developing your personas, to creating content calendars, to finding time to write your blog — it's a lot of work. Only then to realize you need to make calls-to-action, landing pages, content downloads, workflows, lead scoring and more.

Holy Mackerel! That's a lot of work. After all, you need your team to get the booth sent to San Diego for the big trade show in January, there's a new brochure that needs to be printed and your boss just asked you to send a spammy email to your entire database.

Realistically, introducing HubSpot is not going to cut down the amount of work for your team. For every task it helps you automate, there are several others that will take it's place. However, that's not necessarily a reason to throw in the towel.

It's really important that you don't judge the value of your marketing tactics and strategies by the number of tasks and to-dos on your list. Instead, look at your goals and objectives and how your tactics are going to help you both in the short-term AND the long-term.

A lot of the HubSpot methodology centers around the long-term play. If you need help shifting your tactics, consider taking some courses, attending a workshop or getting help from a HubSpot partner to help you get the most out of your experience.

2. I can't keep up with the software changes.

HubSpot is constantly evolving and continuing to broaden its services. When we first became a HubSpot Partner in 2011, the software was fairly straightforward and simple.

Through the years, HubSpot has added all sorts of capabilities from social media tools, to a CMS platform,  and Customer Relations Management (CRM) software and they'll be launching their Customer Management portal in 2018.

If you're someone who likes to master something and have it never change, HubSpot may not be the right fit for you because they're always changing and each year they introduce new products to help businesses.

It is important to consider, however, that the marketing landscape is changing RAPIDLY and it's going to be essential for you to keep up with the latest trends, tactics and technologies. While other platforms are staying stagnant in the middle of all this change, HubSpot's putting in a lot of work to stay relevant and ahead of the curve.

If you are struggling to keep up with the new tools, there are a lot of HubSpot partners out there that spend a lot of time overview new tools and talking through the best use cases for those tools. Make sure that you are surrounding yourself with other thought leaders that can help you leverage the tools at hand.

3. It's just too overwhelming to catch up with everyone else.

As new users dive into inbound marketing and HubSpot they can quickly feel overwhelmed. After virtually no changes in marketing for more than 50 years, the digital marketing landscape is changing at breakneck speed. Blink and you'll miss something!

If you didn't start to adapt your marketing strategies when inbound marketing really started gaining momentum, it's really easy to feel like you are standing at the bottom of giant mountain watching a bunch of people celebrate their successes from the top. And all the while, you are just wondering how you'll ever catch up with everyone around you.

It's important to remember that everyone started somewhere and they learned from both successes and failures along the way. Every single company at the top of the mountain took a thousand small steps to get where they are today.

Don't let the giant list of possible strategies, tactics, trends and to-dos keep you from starting somewhere. If you don't know where to start, ask someone. There are a tons of HubSpot partners and consultants that exist to help companies like yours take their first step.

Make the changes you need to make now, so that one year from now you can stare down from the mountain and look at how far you've come.

4. Should I really put all my eggs in the HubSpot basket?

Some people are, frankly, a little suspicious of HubSpot and its "all-in-one" marketing solution. In essence, they can host your website, your CRM, your database, your analytics and more.

It can feel a little bit overwhelming to trust one company with all of your data and information, but there are a lot of benefits too.  Combining platforms allow you to connect analytics in a way that allows you to see who is completely what actions and how those actions are contributing to your company's bottom line.

But if you are really concerned, all of your data can be exported so that you have access to it in other programs and platforms. In fact, you can use tools like Zapier to send that information over automatically.

Conclusion

Not all organizations have the infrastructure to manage ever detail it takes to make the HubSpot machine run. That's when it can make sense to do one of two things: change your approach to marketing or, work with an outside agency that has the know-how and resources and experience to help you pull the pieces together.

They can work with your existing team or help train your people how to best leverage the power of the software. Is HubSpot for every business? I suppose it's not. Although, for the organizations that are willing to put in a little effort to make it work, it is a powerful solution.

Editors Note: This blog was originally published in September 2013, but was updated on November 30th, 2017.