Who Will Win The Prize of CRM Enterprise?
It’s the modern-day tale of David vs. Goliath as to who will win the fight within the CRM enterprise market. HubSpot recently announced at the INBOUND 18 Marketing Conference their move to bring their popular growth platform into the enterprise market to take on top players like Microsoft, Salesforce, and Marketo with new products within the Enterprise Growth Suite.
Although an ambitious move for HubSpot, it comes as no surprise one of the most popular CRM platforms is aiming to advance its digital foothold by increasing its product and services offering in the enterprise market to expand its global reach.
HubSpot is known traditionally as the platform that helps businesses negotiate their digital transformation journey through CRM, sales and services. However, this announcement signals a new business move to enter the generation of enterprise tools and join big players like Slack, KISSMetrics and Crimson Hexagon who are enjoying widespread adoption of their product across the world.
Market Prognosis expects the global marketing automation software market to register a compound annual growth rate of 7.56% over the forecast period of 2018-2023, which comes as no surprise since the value of marketing automation has over the years, advanced at a great pace. Marketing automation technology vendors have gone to great lengths to provide essential tools for small, medium and enterprise businesses to communicate with customers both existing and potential. They’ve also made sure these tools seamlessly integrate with channels such as social media, paid search, e-mail, display, content syndication, and mobile application so customers can find feasible solutions to information they request or enquire. HubSpot is on trend with capitalizing on this growth and continue to seamlessly integrate and create new enhancements to meet the needs of a growing customer base.
This announcement comes on the heels of many other enhancements as well. In our most recent post, we reviewed their latest product: Service Hub. Other expansions include the March 2018 announcement of its Sales Partner Program - a program to help sales coaches, business consultants, and CRM implementation companies generate business and retain their clients - made available in Latin America. Just shortly before, in February 2018, HubSpot became an official badged marketing partner with Facebook much accredited to its capabilities, deep expertise, and long track record of success in advertising technology.
These continual expansions of services and products are a result of HubSpot's commitment to listening to the customer and the sector needs and wants, and regular extensive research in the betterment of their current products and services or the creation of new ones.
According to HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan, this move in the direction of the enterprise CRM market traditionally dominated by Microsoft and Salesforce is the result of a significant R&D investment.
“Over the past year, we increased R&D spending significantly as we pushed to expand our platform of products to address the needs of any company, regardless of where they are in their growth journey. Today, our customers are getting the results of that investment.”
The R&D Investment
HubSpot research revealed the indicators that led to the creation and enhancements for the products. The analysis showed:
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64% of sales managers (mainly in the UK and US) experience undesired challenges in the way they report on the performance of their teams.
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On average, sales managers are spending 60% of their time working on administrative tasks.
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Nearly seven out of every ten sales contracts require approval from either a legal department, product manager or senior executive before sign-off.
The new HubSpot Sales Hub Enterprise was developed with these challenges in mind, and its features will address these salesperson and team manager's needs.
The New HubSpot Enterprise Suite
As first signaled in a post that gave followers and clients a preview of announcements at the upcoming INBOUND 18, HubSpot highlighted the launch of major upgrades for their Enterprise products, including its Marketing Hub, Sales Hub product, Service Hub, and new Growth Suite bundles.
HubSpot’s Sales Hub Enterprise is designed to help advanced sales teams improve efficiency, reduce time spent on administrative tasks and increase the time spent on selling. These updates are in turn to better support the needs of large, sophisticated teams and provide advanced tools for growing organizations without the complexity.
The individual features that make up the Enterprise Growth Platform as a whole were designed to help sales teams improve their efficiencies, reduce time spent on administrative tasks and increase time spent on what they do best: selling.
Some of the top new features and enhancements include:
Scalable Marketing Tools - Scale up as your business grows with advanced controls over your marketing – such as custom analytic reporting and enhanced social permissions - and automate your optimization with machine learning allowing you to focus on more mission-critical tasks.
Personalization, Personalization, Personalization - Customize the entire buying journey, streamline marketing and sales alignment, and deliver personalized content with features partitioning, recommendations and membership based.
Make Sales Easy, Not Complex - Harness the power of the CRM and sales acceleration tools such as advanced deal management and attribution reporting to manage sophisticated sales motions and keep deals moving forward. Additionally, the new Sales Hub Enterprise platform will see a resource feature hybrid called Sales Playbooks that will allow users to build a library of best practices and resources for the team.
Scale your team and your CRM with Sophistication - More security, flexibility, and sophistication with new features like agent goals and health scoring to help scale your team as they grow. Across all three Enterprise Hubs, additional capabilities will include:
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Advanced team, user and workflow management
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Slack integration
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Machine learning to power features like predictive lead scoring
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HubSpot’s recently-released Conversations tool - uniting customers and users email, chat, and social in one well-designed inbox
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Multiple Currencies
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Single Sign-on
Ending Notes
This new business angle signals the increasing popularity and moves towards enterprise development for software, especially in the digital space. More companies and users are genuinely looking for a single solution that will scale with their business as they grow in client and team size, but also in what they offer concerning products and services.
Putting client feedback, research and R&D at the forefront of their development also showcases the dedication and commitment from HubSpot on listening to their users and the sector to make enhancements.
Finally, with HubSpot stepping into the ring, it will be interesting to see how this may influence the release of new features, platforms or service and pricing models of the more significant players like Salesforce and Microsoft.
Lynette Sawyer
Lynette Sawyer is a Web Project Manager for Falcon-Software, a digital web agency founded in 1994. For the last 13-years Lynette has been in various digital capacities and her expertise goes beyond Project Management. Lynette brings experience and knowledge in graphic design, marketing communications, project management, product management and engagement.