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Small businesses are hungry. Hungry to fundraise, hungry to sell, hungry to earn. But they are trapped in a vicious cycle: They need customers to gain revenue, but gaining customers requires spending money on marketing and sales.
Businesses seeking a way out of this frustrating catch-22 need an affordable solution to start generating inbound leads and sales. In such instances, HubSpot Starter is definitely a solution worth considering.
Getting Started with Sales & Marketing? Choose HubSpot Starter
Among the paid HubSpot subscription types, HubSpot Starter is the least expensive option. Nevertheless, for small businesses, those with limited budgets, or those just getting started with inbound marketing, HubSpot Starter also delivers the most value for your investment:
- All-in-one platform: Get your core marketing, sales, and CRM data and tools consolidated in one place instead of juggling disjointed apps.
- Inbound methodology: Gain hands-on experience executing effective inbound campaigns using HubSpot’s intuitive, user-friendly software.
- Quick results: See the impact of inbound marketing on your leads and generate revenue sooner based on HubSpot’s short learning curve.
- Focus on essentials: Get access to foundational tools like email marketing, landing pages, forms, analytics, and CRM without advanced HubSpot Pro or HubSpot Enterprise features you may not use yet.
- Room to scale: Start with HubSpot Starter to keep costs low initially, and seamlessly upgrade your HubSpot subscription as your business expands over time.
HubSpot Free vs. HubSpot Starter
“Free” is a powerful magic word you want to read cautiously. As a small or medium-sized business owner, cost-cutting is crucial. Yet, the association of “free” with low quality raises concerns. How do you strike a balance? This is where HubSpot Starter comes in!
To clarify, HubSpot does offer a free version, and it is far from low quality. The free version provides access to core marketing, sales, and CRM tools that are comparable to those in paid plans. Moreover, it underscores HubSpot’s commitment to meet the needs of businesses of all sizes. However, the free version is limited, offering only basic access to certain features.
HubSpot Starter bridges this gap, providing a potent tool to unlock advanced features at a relatively modest investment (starting at $50/month for the Marketing Hub Starter and the Sales Hub Starter each). By balancing cost-effectiveness and feature accessibility, businesses can leverage additional capabilities beyond the free version, enabling small teams to punch above their weight.
Here’s a comparison of selected tools accessible with HubSpot’s Marketing Hub Starter and Sales Hub Starter:
“HubSpot Starter has more advanced features” — How Does it Practically Drive Marketing and Sales?
So yes, HubSpot Starter presents an array of advanced features and capabilities at your fingertips. But, in fact, the benefits run deeper than just expanding functionality.
Boosted Team Productivity
For small teams, time and workforce are limited; therefore, these resources need to be effectively utilized for greater business results. HubSpot Starter powers your team to accomplish more within their existing workload. By already leveraging HubSpot’s platform (upgrading from the Free to the Starter version), your team can immediately activate more robust features, reporting, and integrations to work more productively on larger, more sophisticated projects without expending unnecessary amounts of time.
Enhanced Customer Experience
As HubSpot Starter enables taking marketing automation one step further, small teams can both make better use of their time and deliver timely and relevant messaging to prospects. For instance, you can leverage website behavior data for contextualized marketing campaigns and personalized emails based on your audience’s progress through the buyer’s journey. Data-driven insights that are channeled into lead nurturing create a superior user experience, fostering increased engagement and sales.
Elevated Brand Recognition
With HubSpot Starter you can remove HubSpot branding from forms, email templates, and landing pages to consistently reflect your own brand across all touchpoints. Practically speaking, this customization strengthens brand recognition as customers associate messaging and interactions solely with your business’s brand image. The more exposure the audience has to the brand, the stronger the brand image they will recall.
Case Study: Take HubSpot Starter to the Max
Lean Discovery Project (Lean) is a small business providing tech startups with UX design and software engineering solutions. Despite generating ample leads, Lean lacked visibility into its sales pipeline to nurture and convert leads effectively. Their disjointed tech stack also failed to provide comprehensive real-time data for informed strategy building.
To optimize its marketing and sales, Lean implemented the HubSpot Starter CRM Suite. This gave Lean access to the Starter versions of HubSpot’s CRM, Marketing, Sales, CMS, Service, and Operations Hubs, on one connected platform.
The HubSpot Starter CRM Suite delivered:
- Visibility into every sale stage and deal status through deal boards
- A seamless, interconnected environment under “HubSpot Ecosystem”
- More robust quote and invoice functionality
Just two weeks post-implementation, Lean saw a 5X increase in closed deals YoY. The unified HubSpot suite allowed Lean to streamline processes, reduce lead leakage, and confidently pursue larger clients. Lean also saved 10+ hours per week in operations.
Getting Started with HubSpot Starter
For resource-constrained or new-to-marketing small businesses, HubSpot Starter strikes the optimal balance of value and features, thus putting you in a better position to kickstart your inbound marketing and sales efforts with comfort and ease.
Waypost Marketing has been a HubSpot Solutions Partner since 2014, meaning our professional teams have the experience and expertise to help you get started. If your company is brand new to HubSpot, or if you’ve had HubSpot for a while, reach out and introduce yourself to us. We look forward to getting to know you.
