There are a lot of great reasons for you to sign up for HubSpot Sales Pro. It can integrate with Gmail or Outlook 360 and the automatically log communications back to the HubSpot CRM. It has a helpful email scheduling tool and can track who opens your email and how often. It comes with a huge library of templates that can make your business extra-efficient. The list goes on.
But while these are great reasons why you should download and use HubSpot Sales Pro, there are also some reasons why you shouldn’t. Below are three common indicators that you shouldn’t be downloading the software for with your inbound sales process.
1. You want to mass email people.
If you’re thinking about buying HubSpot Sales Pro because you think it will help with your mass email efforts, think again. Though the software has a lot of email features built into it to help make you more efficient in your outreach efforts, it really isn’t a tool for mass emails. And the reason for that is simple: Sending mass emails isn’t likely to help you close sales and retain customers, because mass emails (done poorly) are essentially spam.
Sending generic mass emails to your entire list of contacts in hopes of spurring a sale isn’t efficient. It doesn’t work, and people hate it. Instead of focusing on sending out as many emails as possible in the shortest amount of time, you should instead be focusing on sending out quality emails to specifically targeted individuals. By segmenting your email list, you can increase the rate of success of all of your campaigns, and by personalizing each email that you send out, you tailor your message to each potential customer.
HubSpot Sales Pro can help you in both of these endeavors, but it won’t help you simply send out more effective mass emails. By creating and using email templates, you can save yourself a lot of time by becoming more efficient—but you need to make sure you are still personalizing the content. If you don’t, the email will have a very cookie-cutter feel that can turn customers off from working with you.
2. You think you can remove the human element from your business.
Some people love technology so much that if they could replace every part of their business with technology, they would. After all, tech is the way of the future, right? In some ways, sure. But in a lot of cases, relying too heavily on the “wonders of technology” may be hurting your business.
Using HubSpot Sales Pro will let you do a lot of really great things, from using email templates to setting up automated email follow-up sequences. But if you don’t tailor these tools so that they seem personalized, your customers aren’t going to respond positively to them. Templated emails without a human touch are interpreted as being “cold” by customers. Relying on templates exclusively, without tailoring your message, risks coming across as cookie-cutter, and people hate being treated in a cookie-cutter fashion.
So long as you don’t try to completely remove the human touch from your sales process, HubSpot Sales Pro will be a good tool for you to use. But if you think that using it will allow you to rely on technology completely for your outreach efforts, you’ll be pretty disappointed. The human element is important: It’s what drives sales. Trying to remove it is ultimately a foolish decision.
3. You want cheap marketing automation.
If you are thinking about downloading HubSpot Sales Pro because you think that it will be a good, cheap alternative to a more expensive marketing automation system, you’re likely to be pretty disappointed. The reason? Because HubSpot Sales Pro isn’t a marketing automation system: It’s the sales-based extension to the marketing automation tool.
Marketing automation systems, like HubSpot Marketing, tend to cost a lot of money: Anywhere from $800 to $1,200 per month. And that’s a substantial increase from the $50 that you’d have to pay to use HubSpot Sales Pro. But there’s a reason for the price discrepancy. HubSpot Marketing is a full lead nurturing tool and all-in-one marketing platform that allows you to acquire, track, and develop leads from the first time that they visit your website. This system has the potential to significantly impact your ability to close sales, so as a product it can command a higher price point.
HubSpot Sales Pro, on the other hand, unlocks additional capabilities of HubSpot Marketing and the HubSpot CRM. Sure, you can use Sales Pro on its own to help you in some of your sales efforts, but you won’t reap most of its benefits unless you are partnering it with HubSpot Marketing/CRM. If you think that using it on its own will replace the need for a full marketing automation system, you’re in for a rude awakening.
Look, we get it: It can be hard getting others to buy into the idea that you need to pay $800 for HubSpot Marketing access. Maybe your budget is too tight to justify the expense. Maybe you’ve got the wiggle room, but just don’t know how to make the case for it. Maybe you, as a member of the sales team, just don’t want to feel like you’re trying to tell the marketing department how to do its job. If this describes you, then it makes sense that you might try to fill your gaps by using HubSpot Sales Pro. And yes: It’s a smart instinct to try to capitalize on some of the benefits that the program has to offer, even if you can’t access the bulk of its benefits. But you won’t truly be able to tap into the power of HubSpot Sales Pro unless you first learn to make the case for the products that it needs to partner with to be successful (HubSpot Marketing and HubSpot CRM). Anything less will be like trying to fill a round hole with a square peg: It might work for a little while, but water is still going to leak in because of the poor fit.
Bringing It All Together
The bottom line is that HubSpot Sales Pro is an amazing tool that can help businesses excel in their ability to engage and qualify more leads and close more deals. But it isn’t a silver bullet. If you’re tempted to download it because you think it will help with your mass email efforts, or because you want to take the human element out of your business, or because you think it can replace a full marketing automation system, you need to shift your thinking.
