Navigating the murky waters of HubSpot Sales Hub tiers and features can lead to a lot of frustration. The answer of which one your sales team needs isn’t always clear cut and that makes it even harder to get buy-in from your team for their new sales CRM.
HubSpot’s Sales Hub helps you keep your leads organized, track revenue and saves time in follow ups and outreach. As with all the Hubs, there are three levels of Sales Hub (besides the free version): starter, professional and enterprise.
I talked with Krista Donohoe, one of our MarTech Strategists and HubSpot wizard, who dives into the features of each tier to clear up the decision for you and your team.
⭐ Considering Hubspot? Work with a HubSpot Onboarding Accredited Partner.
Why Sales Hub?
First off, why use HubSpot’s Sales Hub?
HubSpot offers a variety of sales tools that help you align your sales and marketing efforts so you can run coordinated campaigns and keep track of leads as they move through the customer journey. This enables your sales team to focus on the highest qualified leads and, in turn, close more deals.
“There are a couple of signs it’s time to get Sales Hub,” Krista explains. “First is if you’re at the point in your business where you have a sales pipeline or a significant number of inbound leads. Second is if you have a team who needs to know where those leads are in the sales process to do their job.”
Krista notes some of her favorite features that have helped our clients grow and scale their businesses:
- Sequences
- Email Templates
- Snippets
- Pipeline automation
She adds that snippets, in particular, can save you a lot of time when communicating with leads. Have to answer the same question every day? Create a snippet! Need to have a product description on hand? Use a snippet!
She also loves the pipeline automation capabilities HubSpot offers. “If you have a deal that reaches a demo stage or you need to do a follow-up, you can automatically create a task, send a notification or assign an action to someone. This helps you ensure you’re moving deals down the pipeline and not letting leads sit unattended.”
Research has shown that sales reps spend a startlingly low amount of their workweek actually selling — only 35.2% (roughly 14 hours) to be exact. HubSpot can save your sales team time on administrative time vacuums by automating things like task creation, reminders to follow up with past leads, deal updates and more. The more things that are automated, the more time your sales team can spend actually selling.
Free vs. Paid
We’re about to dive into the different paid plans for Sales Hub, but it’s worth noting that anyone can use a free version. It has helpful features like meeting scheduling, building a deal pipeline, generating quotes and contact management. However, you only get very basic access to these features.
You'll need to spring for a paid plan if you want more advanced control of your sales process, like automation, sequences or custom reporting. The higher level you choose, the more functionality you can access. But higher doesn’t always mean better. You want to choose the level that fits your business and aligns with your needs. Let’s look at your options.
Sales Hub Plans
Starting prices and features for Sales Hub plans. You can also bundle Hubs for your business.
Starter
The Sales Hub Starter plan is perfect for businesses that are just starting to do outbound sales or are setting up a true sales team instead of relying solely on inbound leads. It’s where you start off your new or small sales team so you can build positive habits as your business grows.
Some of the key features Krista highlights in this plan include:
- Simple automation capabilities
- Basic reporting
- Setting sales goals
- Meeting scheduling
“Meeting scheduling is a big one,” she notes. “People don’t use that one enough, but it can really save your sales team time if they don’t have to coordinate with leads to get a time and date set up.”
She adds that automation is another highly valuable (and time-saving) feature of the Starter plan. You have access to email and form automation with up to 10 automated actions for each, versus just one action for each with the free version.
Starting at just $45 a month, the Starter plan is incredibly cost-effective. However, Krista warns that you might feel limited if you start scaling your business quickly.
“You’ll hit roadblocks on functionality pretty quickly if you start growing. There are some ways to work around those obstacles and make the plan continue working for you or you can upgrade.”
Professional
Sales Hub Professional caters to slightly larger sales teams. If you have a multi-person team — especially one that works in tandem with a marketing team — then this plan will be your best fit.
Professional comes with all the features you find in Starter, plus a few extras and advanced functionality. Krista’s favorite feature at this level is sequences, which make it easy for multiple people to work different portions of your sales funnel.
“Sequences are super valuable and a huge time saver but they’re really underutilized among people with this level of Sales Hub. They save you a ton of admin time and keep leads moving consistently and reliably,” she says.
With sequences, you can automate the sales process so tasks switch ownership at the right time and the right people are notified. For example, when a viewer is converted to a lead, it can notify your marketing team to enroll them in an email nurture campaign. When they schedule a call, it can notify the salesperson that there’s a new prospect in their court.
“You can base sequences on different relevant actions — like task completion or engagement — to tailor them to your workflows and business. That way as people move through your funnel, the deal is automatically pushed down the pipeline and closer to a sale.”
The Professional plan is significantly more expensive (starting at $450/month), but the trade-off is the expanded capabilities.
“You can sit in Pro with a sales team a lot longer than you can in Starter,” Krista explains. “You won’t run into as many problems as you grow and scale, with the exception of reporting.”
She says that in the Professional plan, Sales Hub will only report on what has happened (a.k.a. historical reporting), not what might happen. To access features like forecasting and revenue projections over time, you need the Enterprise plan.
Enterprise
I know forecasting and revenue projections sound like the fancy features you wish you had, but just like the other levels, Enterprise is not for everyone. This tier of Sales Hub is designed for corporations and enterprise-level businesses with large sales teams and segmented audiences.
“Enterprise is especially helpful if you’re managing more than one brand under your roof,” Krista says. “In that case, you can use business units to easily manage the different brands and make them feel distinct from each other.” She notes this is necessary for clean data management if you have a big book of business.
You can also start playing with HubSpot’s predictive lead scoring and forecasting tools at this level. You can measure and predict your recurring revenue as well as forecast business performance based on historical data.
Plus, you get access to playbooks, which Krista notes is helpful if you’re bringing on junior team members and need a consistent way to train them.
The final feature Krista loves about Enterprise is the custom objects functionality. “If you’re looking to track what someone has done over time, you can create a custom object to attach to it,” she explains. These might be items contacts have purchased in the past or readers for a specific author on your blog. It’s an easy way to collect custom data that your team can use in the sales process.
The biggest benefit to using Enterprise? The sky's the limit. You won’t run into roadblocks with functionality or capabilities and your business can continue scaling and growing.
The biggest drawback, however, is the price. Starting at $1,200/month, the price tag reminds users that this level of Sales Hub is designed for big corporations with big budgets.
The Right Tools for the Job
Choosing the right level of HubSpot Sales Hub for your needs and your budget is the first step to ensuring you’re set up for success. Remember that the functionality you choose should match the size of your sales team and your business goals.
To learn more about leveraging HubSpot in your business, check out this blog. Or if you need some help setting up or optimizing your HubSpot account, we can help with that too.
