Freelance HubSpot Consultants For Every Need

HubSpot Marketing 101

HubSpot is a cloud-based integrated business software and marketing platform that empowers businesses to focus on customer-centric relationships, enabling them to grow not only bigger but also better. 

Unlike many other CRM and digital marketing platforms out there, HubSpot’s “secret sauce” is helping businesses deliver connected customer experiences to fuel their growth. 

HubSpot was created in 2006 by two fellow Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) graduate students, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah. 

They observed that customers no longer welcome interruptive bids for their attention, which is what outbound marketing does. So, they built HubSpot, which is founded on inbound marketing, which Shah wrote a book on in 2009 and revised in 2014.

Halligan and Shah are big believers in continuous improvement to not only keep with but stay on top of fast-changing marketing trends. So, they created HubSpot to help businesses consistently focus on delivering unified customer experiences as key to business growth.

HubSpot believes that turning strangers into prospects, then prospects into customers, and customers into promoters is a complex journey that all businesses face. 

Using its inbound marketing methodology and integrated technology, businesses can turn this journey of attracting, engaging, and delighting customers so they become their brand advocates into a seamless experience. This is illustrated in HubSpot’s flywheel below:

Businesses can also create a connected community among their customers to help fuel their growth – all in HubSpot’s all-in-one business software solution.

G2, an independent company that gathers and publishes unbiased user reviews, named HubSpot the No. 1 Global Software Company in G2’s 2023 Best Software Awards.‍

CRM challenges businesses face

You must have heard or read about the challenges businesses face using CRMS while attempting to scale, using other – and often, multiple – CRM and digital marketing platforms. 

1. Frankensystems

For one, there’s the nightmare that Frankensystems creates. 

A Frankensystem is basically a cobbled-together system businesses create, trying to make different technologies and platforms work together when they weren’t designed to work together in the first place. 

Different technologies used for different purposes by different teams create silos, resulting in clunky user experiences for customers and making these technologies harder to align. These can also result in inflexible tech stacks, making them harder to adopt by different teams who need to collaborate together. 

All these result in unexpectedly high costs of ownership for your business without the commensurate returns on investment (ROI) to show for it.

HubSpot offers a well-crafted and unified –not a cobbled-together-- solution for CRM, from attracting and engaging the right prospects to delighting them and making them loyal customers. Isn’t this what you’d want for your business?

2. Developer choke point

When businesses can’t update their web pages, redesign their emails, or publish their landing pages without their developer’s help, it’s not just developer dependency but an outright choke point. The back-and-forth between you and your developer devours efficiency and costs you time and money.

HubSpot has always offered website hosting but formally launched its Content Management System (CMS) Hub in 2020 with beefed-up website hosting capabilities. 

With the CMS Hub’s business unit subdomains, you can efficiently manage all your assets in a unified system without having to rely on a developer for basic prospect and customer communication operations and without the usual complexity content management entails.

3. Poor sales support tools

You know that for effective prospecting, your business needs to respond to sales leads appropriately and in a timely manner if you want these leads to move closer to purchase. 

However, when your teams are working on different platforms, they don’t have the resources necessary to effectively follow up and manage the leads coming in through your website. This means lost opportunities for your business to convert these leads further along their customer journey with you.

HubSpot’s Sales Hub tools can help your teams respond to leads more promptly and effectively and close more deals. These tools include:

• Automated sequences
• Compliance
• Deals dashboard
• Documents Library
• Email templates
• Meeting scheduling
• Snippets
• 1:1 videos
  

At HubSpot’s annual conference, INBOUND23, where 11,000 business leaders got together, HubSpot also launched a new Sales Hub tool incorporating AI to help teams prospect and manage deals better. So, your sales team can focus on what they do best – making sales – instead of spending a huge chunk of their time on administrative tasks in support of sales.‍

4. Unsatisfactory customer experience

Customers fall through the cracks when they have to work too hard just to become your customers. When their support requests remain unanswered or when they have to repeatedly provide the same information to different support teams – these endanger your relationship with them.

Your business may just lack customer self-serve tools for frequently asked questions (FAQs) and easily resolved issues. Or, your business may need a better platform that systematically collects customer feedback so you can really use it promptly to improve your services and your products.

HubSpot’s Service Hub’s diverse range of tools makes it easier for your customers to remain your customers while you close the gaps towards generating revenue. 

For example, you and your customers can use HubSpot’s:

• Chatbots and live chat tools
• Conversion inbox to manage all incoming support messages, including from shared email addresses and your social media accounts
• Customer portals so your customers can get the help they need when they need it, minimize recurring tasks for your team, and build customer trust
• Customer support ticketing system
• Knowledge base
• Payments tools
  

5. Making decisions based on irrelevant or incomplete data

Blind spots, aggravated by Frankensystems, can make it more difficult to decide for your business. A cobbled-together system of technologies can make it harder to uncover the relevant data you need to make those significant decisions. Worse, old, non-synced data can skew any insights you have and cause you to make bad decisions.

HubSpot’s Operations Hub helps you keep your data clean and timely. It allows for seamless data syncing, data automation, and custom coding. These enable continuous data flow between any operation and help you make real-time decisions and actions.

Bottom-line, it’s not just about teams working together but about information that can be easily accessed, updated, customer-centric, and easy to use by the right person at the right time.

HubSpot provides a Single Source of Truth (SSOT) to overcome all these challenges, so company-wide alignment is easier and faster. 

HubSpot’s customer platform was built in-house, based on studies of actual customer journeys and challenges with different CRMs. The end result is an integrated business platform that’s cohesive, customizable, connected, and easy to adopt at a lower cost of ownership compared to cobbled-together solutions.

In fact, HubSpot has found that:

• When CRMs are easy to use, businesses are 2.1 times more likely to experience business growth.
• Businesses that have customizable CRMS are 131% time more likely to experience customer satisfaction.
• Businesses that have all their CRM tools in a single platform enjoy 2.7 times higher ROIs from their tech stack.

What is the main use of HubSpot?

HubSpot helps businesses attract the right visitors, convert leads, and close and retain customers through its integrated, all-in-one CRM and digital marketing platform. 

You can start free with HubSpot, but you’ll soon find that you would need to upgrade to its paid subscriptions to make fuller use of its powerful capabilities for your business.

With HubSpot’s suites of tools, called Hubs, over a thousand integrations, and its Smart CRM software enhanced by artificial intelligence (AI), businesses can use HubSpot for, among many other digital marketing functions:

• Website hosting and design
• Content management
• Marketing automation
• Marketing program management
• Sales enablement and automation
• Customer service tools and automation
• Data appending and automation
• Reporting and analytics
  

The glue that holds all these Hubs together is the HubSpot CRM platform. This free platform helps you organize, score, and track your leads and customers across the different Hubs. This free tool saves you and your team from using a spreadsheet (or even multiple spreadsheets) to organize your contacts.  

With the HubSpot CRM, you can:

• Keep track of everyone your business interacts with through the user contact information tool 
• Promptly answer questions and build good relationships with prospects and customers through the real-time live chat tool
• Easily upload and sync contacts with Gmail and Outlook through the contact syncing tool
• Monitor the emails, calls, and other interactions you’ve made with each customer through the activity-tracking tool
• View and organize contacts according to how close they are to purchase through the pipeline visibility tool
  

What service does HubSpot offer?

HubSpot offers a customer-focused business platform with its five main Hubs: Marketing, Sales, Service, Content Management System (CMS), and Operations. ‍

By fully utilizing these Hubs, companies’ different teams-- from marketing to sales to customer service-- can all work better together to deliver a seamless customer experience and fuel their companies’ growth.

Marketing Hub

HubSpot’s Marketing Hub contains everything businesses need to run a marketing campaign that attracts, engages, and delights prospective and existing customers. 

It helps your business create compelling content in front of the right audiences, turn your website visitors into leads, convert your leads into customers, and retain your customers towards being brand promoters.

Marketing Hub tools include:

• Analytics
• Blogs
• Emails
• Landing pages
• Marketing automation
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 
• Social media marketing
  

Sales Hub

HubSpot’s Sales Hub lets you manage, communicate with, and track your leads since they have more visibility in the pipeline. Your sales team doesn’t have to spend a lot of time entering data or writing the same emails over and over again. They can instead use this precious time to actually engage with leads and nurture their conversion into new customers.

Sales Hub features include:

• Email sequences
• Email templates
• Free calling
• Meeting scheduling
• Pipeline tracking
• Playbooks
  

Service Hub

HubSpot’s Service Hub makes it easy for businesses to connect with customers and manage and build positive relationships with them.

Service Hub tools include:

• Conversational bots
• Customer feedback
• Knowledge base
• Live chat
• Reporting and goals
• Support tickets

CMS Hub

HubSpot’s CMS Hub is like a lighter but more focused version of the Marketing Hub. 

Since content and lead generation are essential inbound marketing strategy components, the CMS Hub helps you get the most value out of your website and generate more leads. 

With a fully loaded CMS, you can take your content marketing efforts to a higher level, and align them with your marketing, sales, service, and operations efforts, too.

The CMS Hub includes the following tools:

• Attribution reporting, so you can see which traffic sources and visitor web behaviors are most conducive to your intended visitor actions and conversions
• Adaptive testing, to easily A/B test content and figure out the copy and design elements that best serve the results you want
• Drag and drop web editor, with no coding knowledge required
• SEO tools so your website and webpages can rank better in search engine results
• Web analytics to easily track traffic flows and conversions across all your web pages
  

Operations Hub

HubSpot’s Operations Hub is data-centric and facilitates automation, so you can connect your apps and sync customer data across teams. 

In this Hub, you can clean up redundant data and automate your repetitive processes so you can free up your teams’ attention, time, and energy to focus on their core functions and not get bogged down by administrative tasks.

Operations Hub features include:

• Custom-coded workflow actions, which allow you to execute code (such as JavaScript or Python) to extend functions within or outside of HubSpot
• Data deduplication to avoid duplicate contacts and other messy data
• Field mapping to avoid manual re-entry of the same contact information across different platforms
• Real-time, two-way data synchronization to avoid data inconsistencies across different teams
• Webhooks to share data across platforms when triggered by your pre-set custom events
  

As your business scales, you don’t need a patchwork of different solutions and platforms that aren’t scalable. You require a unified one that quickly adapts to your business needs as it grows.

New: Commerce Hub

Now, HubSpot also has a Commerce Hub to easily manage customer payments. This contains all the tools and integrations businesses need to request and collect payments, streamline subscriptions, and increase their efficiency with relevant automation and meaningful reporting. 

Commerce Hub can be used with businesses’ existing payment gateways and accounting tools, with Stripe and QuickBooks integrations.

Based on data from HubSpot’s more than 158,000 business customers, the HubSpot ROI Report shows that after one year of using HubSpot’s CRM platform, on average, businesses improved performance in the following metrics by the following corresponding rates:

• Deal close rate, 109%
• Deals closed, 36%
• Inbound leads, 129%
• Tickets close rate, 37%
• Website traffic, 113%
  

The HubSpot ROI Report also showed that business customers with more Hubs saw more growth.  

For example, those who utilized both the Marketing Hub and the Sales Hub experienced greater improvement in deals closed over time than those who only used the Sales Hub.

Marketing Hub customers saw 115% more leads after just six months, while Sales Hub customers increased their deal close rate by 78% after just six months. But Marketing and Sales Hub customers create 154% more deals than customers with Sales Hub only.

Additionally, 86% of Service Hub customers experience time savings.

Why Do You Need A HubSpot Consultant?

You or your team can use HubSpot on your own, starting with its free plan and learning along the way through trial-and-error while studying the free courses at the HubSpot Academy until you become HubSpot experts. 

But you don’t want to take this route if you want results fast and you don’t have the required attention and time to invest in the learning curve. This is why you need a HubSpot consultant who already has the experience and good track record, including certifications, with HubSpot.

You particularly need a HubSpot consultant if:

• You’ve just set up your CRM portal but did not have the proper onboarding services, and you had to do it yourself clunkily.
• You went through an onboarding process, but the process did not include a plan for ongoing data maintenance and health.
• You went through the onboarding process many years ago, and you haven’t had your portal audited ever since or within the last year.
• You don’t have a dedicated and expert team member whose job duties include CRM portal maintenance.
• You’ve worked with one or more CRM agencies before, and you’re not happy with the results. 
• You are ready to make full use of HubSpot’s powerful tools for your business.
  

All these indicate that your CRM portal is possibly undergoing change or facing data decay. Without regular monitoring and maintenance, your CRM portal’s data health and even automated processes will begin to fail. 

HubSpot tools are powerful but complex. You need a HubSpot consultant with the expertise to optimize your business’s use of its powerful tools.

What Does A HubSpot Consultant Do?

A HubSpot consultant essentially audits your CRM portal and creates a strategy for improvement. 

This HubSpot expert helps your business optimize your marketing, sales, and service processes by cleaning up your architecture and creating time-saving automation that incorporates your business processes into the HubSpot software. 

This generates more buy-in and enablement for your team and results in a better CRM process and reporting for your business.

HubSpot consultant jobs

There are five types of HubSpot consulting:

1. HubSpot Technical Consulting

HubSpot technical consulting focuses on providing you with expert insights into the more technical side of your business, focusing on HubSpot and how it’s suitably serving your marketing, sales, customer service, operations, and web development efforts.

The HubSpot Technical Consultant carefully assesses your business for what’s working well and what needs improvement and recommends what new elements to develop in your HubSpot platform to better serve your business goals.

The technical consultant provides services such as:

• Application Programming Interface (API) implementation
• Custom design work within HubSpot
• Creating and improving technical processes with documentation
• Migrating to HubSpot from another CMS
• Training you and your team in web development, system administration, and other technical tasks
• Troubleshooting technical issues
  

2. HubSpot Inbound Consulting

Are you using HubSpot for your website but haven’t really maximized its use for inbound marketing? Or, do you want to create and implement an effective inbound marketing strategy to scale your business but don’t know how? Then, a HubSpot Inbound Consultant can help you with these and more.

Like any consultant, they will, of course, assess your business and implemented strategies so far, then recommend how to improve your inbound marketing efforts. But it doesn’t end there.

When hiring a consultant, it helps them and you to be clear and specific about which inbound marketing services you need help with so their consulting services can be more focused. Typically, businesses require help with website SEO, content marketing, and social media.

Inbound marketing is basically attracting, engaging, and delighting customers through compelling content. So, a HubSpot Inbound Consultant can help you with:

• Attracting strategies such as creating and publishing quality content that resonates with your target audiences and SEO content strategies
• Engaging strategies such as inbound sales calls and solution selling
• Delighting strategies such as incorporating thoughtful, well-timed surveys, chatbots, and social media listening
  

They can also help you with deciding which inbound marketing tools to use and how to use them, such as

1. Attract tools

• Ads
• Blogs
• Content strategy
• Social media
• Video

2. Engage tools

• Conversational bots
• Email marketing
• Lead flows
• Lead management
• Marketing automation

3. Delight tools

• Attribution reporting 
• Conversations inbox
• Email marketing
• Marketing automation
• Smart content
  

3. HubSpot Sales Consulting

One of the biggest challenges that sales teams continually deal with is managing leads, including tracking customer touchpoints and ensuring that each lead moves through the sales pipeline steadily.

Sales pipelines typically involve moving prospects from the awareness stage to the consideration stage, then the purchase decision stage. 

A HubSpot Sales Consultant will be able to look at each stage of your sales pipeline and help you identify any bottlenecks that prevent your prospects from moving forward.

4. HubSpot Customer Training Consulting

A HubSpot Customer Training Consultant specializes in training the different members of your teams to collaboratively use and manage different aspects of the platform. 

This way, when something needs to be tweaked, or something goes awry, you have your in-house team capacitated with the knowledge and skills to address these issues promptly and make necessary changes.

You may also want your in-house team to eventually have complete control over the maintenance and functionality of your HubSpot platform or even just specific portions of it. Your HubSpot Customer Training Consultant can train these in-house team members and prepare them for a full takeover.

5. HubSpot Migration Services Consulting

When you decide to migrate your CMS system to HubSpot, you need expertise not just in data transfer but also with your pipeline information and sales and payments processes.

To ensure that all your data are properly sorted, categorized, and uploaded into HubSpot, you’d need the expertise of a HubSpot Migration Services Consultant who is trained to do exactly this. 

They will also help you with automation and rules so that incoming leads, for example, get placed with the right salespeople.

How much does a HubSpot consultant cost?

HubSpot consulting services’ rates typically depend on the consultant’s expertise and track record, frequency, and length of consulting sessions, and the level of strategic support required by the business client. This can range from $300 to $2,500 per month.

At Growth Collective, though, you won’t be tied to long-term contracts with your HubSpot Consultant. 

Our HubSpot Consultants’ hourly rates range between $50 to $150-plus per hour if you choose the hourly pricing. Mid-level consultants are at $50 to $100 per hour, Senior level consultants are at $100 to $150 per hour, and Executive level consultants start at $150 per hour.

We also support flat rate or retainer arrangements, depending on what works best for you and your business. Consultants’ rates vary depending on the type and level of work, location, and a host of other factors.

Benefits of Having Your Own HubSpot Consultant

A HubSpot consultant is, of course, an expert in HubSpot. They usually have various HubSpot Certifications in the categories they specialize in. For sure, they have significant experience and a good track record in using HubSpot for business clients. 

Having your own HubSpot consultant helps you develop custom strategies for your business using the HubSpot platform to its fullest capabilities so you can scale your business.

Hiring your own HubSpot consultant provides you with the following benefits:

• HubSpot expertise, with experienced perspective and guidance on different Hubs, markets, teams, and use cases
• Clear objectives with documented outcomes and reporting
• Remove roadblocks that appear in your processes and prevent them from smoothly flowing through
• Streamline processes that have become complicated and even bogged down with unnecessary steps
• Time and cost savings through efficient auditing and strategy execution
• Ongoing maintenance and communication to align strategies and expectations
• Get the most of the HubSpot platform and its powerful tools
  

How To Choose And Hire Your HubSpot Consultant

As with any endeavor, selecting the best match for your business requires a mindful and organized strategy. 

Here are eight essential tips for choosing and hiring your HubSpot Consultant:

1. Clarify your business needs, goals, and project scope. Clearly identifying what your business needs and goals are and which part of your CRM system needs the support of your consultant helps you both in determining project objectives and outcomes to work for, document, and report. ‍

2. Determine your budget. How much are you willing to invest in your business’ growth and prosperity by availing of a HubSpot Consultant’s service to attain the goals you want that will meet your business needs?‍

3. Research and shortlist your prospective consultants. Read online reviews of prospective consultants you’d like to work with and ask for recommendations. Shortlist consultants with relevant expertise, track record, and positive feedback from businesses similar to yours.‍

4. Match their expertise with your business needs and goals. Check the shortlisted consultants’ strategy development approach, quality of work, efficiency of implementation, and specific tool usage. Consider how these match your specific business needs and goals. Further, trim down your shortlist.‍

5. Request for an initial free consultation and proposal. Of the shortened shortlist, contact your prospective consultants and ask for an initial free consultation meeting with them.

During the meeting, discuss your business goals and challenges. Assess how well they understand your business, and explore with them which proposed approach would best meet your business needs. 

Emphasize that you require a customized approach to your business. How well can they tailor their strategies to your business? Determine how strategic and systems-oriented their thinking is.

Also, assess how well they communicate with you and what are their available times and channels for communicating with you if you engage their services.

At the end of the meeting, request for a formal consultancy proposal from them.‍

6. Ask for references and case studies. Ask if they can provide you with references from their former clients. Request also for case studies that can illustrate their strategic approach, quality and efficiency of work, specific tool usage, and the results and outcomes they’ve delivered.‍

7. Contract and collaborate. Once you’ve chosen the best-matched consultant for your business, detail your terms of engagement in a contract. Include project scope, deliverables, timelines, and ongoing support, as well as consequences if the deliverables are not achieved.‍

8. Engage in regular updates and feedback. Maintain regular communication with your consultant throughout the contracted project. Daily updates will help you track the project’s progress and let you provide feedback to them so that the project stays aligned with your goals.

At Growth Collective, we’ve made this process easier and quicker for you. You only need to do the first and last couple of steps; the rest we’ve done for you. 

With our advanced algorithm to support us, we personally invite, vet, certify, and select the HubSpot experts we match you with based on these specific criteria: 

• At least five years of related experience
• A 5-star track record of client satisfaction
• A true expert in HubSpot
• Excellent communication and timeliness
  

All you need to do is create a role, let our team match you with a selection of the right HubSpot consultants, and select the HubSpot expert you want to work with – all within 48 hours.

After you create a role, our team of experienced marketers, using our advanced algorithm, comb through our vast network of industry experts for the perfect fit. Then, we reach out to them to gauge their interest in and availability for your project. 

If they’re interested, we communicate with you why we think they would be a good fit, provide you with a link to their Growth Collective profile, and send you instructions on how to schedule an introductory call with them. You will also receive a personal note from them.

If, at any time, you are unhappy with your HubSpot Consultant, simply let us know, and we will go through the matching process again and recommend other specialists to you.  

Since projects are for a specific scope of work with well-defined deliverables, you won’t be committing significant time and money until you’re satisfied.

Book a free consultation call now.

Should You Hire A HubSpot Consultant?

You should consider investing in a HubSpot Consultant for your business if:

• Your business is scaling, or you want it to scale quicker.
• You need guidance in targeting the exact right audience for you.
• You have a few quality leads, and you want them to grow fast.
• You’re unable to measure the ROI from your marketing efforts.
• You want to use all features of HubSpot’s CRM and powerful tools to exponentially scale your business.
• You want to save time and effort by availing of HubSpot consulting expertise and make sure you get your money’s worth for the HubSpot investment.
  

If you qualify for any of these criteria, then you stand to take the most advantage of hiring your own HubSpot Consultant.

The right expert can change the trajectory of your business. We have pre-vetted experts across every major marketing channel, tool, and vertical.

Our experts have proven track records working with such diverse top brands as Amazon, Airbnb, Citrix, Dow Jones, Facebook, Ghirardelli, Google, IBM, Pokémon, SnapTravel, and Visa, among many companies.

Get started now.