Most CRM reviews are robo-comparisons by people who've never opened the product. This is a HubSpot CRM review by someone who's used it daily for a year, through the major late-2018 pricing revamp. Here's the honest verdict — what's worth paying for, what the free tier actually delivers, and the gotchas you won't find in HubSpot's own marketing.
B2B teams default to assuming social media is for B2C — cute cats, brunches, viral B2C campaigns. The money's in business though, and every major platform has a business mode. Here's the definitive guide to B2B social media: which platforms suit which industries (LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram), how to set objectives, and why posting regularly without valuable content does worse than not posting at all.
"We tried digital marketing and it didn't work" — heard it from too many small businesses, and almost always the same six mistakes are in play. Ignoring Facebook, contributing to the wrong blogs, joining networks without a plan, assuming the persona, trying to reach everyone, no campaigns at all. Here are the mistakes and how to avoid each one before they cost you another year of "it doesn't work".
There's no direct LinkedIn-to-HubSpot integration, which sounds like a problem until you discover linkedhub — a free Chrome extension that bridges them well enough for daily lead-prospecting work. Here's how we use it to enhance lead data, save data-entry time, and turn LinkedIn into a HubSpot input channel in about five minutes of setup.
Most blog readers will never fill in a form — and most inbound marketers leave that traffic to evaporate. HubSpot's Prospects tool quietly shows you which company domains are visiting, even when nobody downloads anything. Here's the exact process for turning that raw "interest" signal into named leads, including filters, alerts, content scoring and the LinkedIn lookup that closes the loop.
A B2B sale takes 3 to 12 months, costs serious sales time, and might involve hundreds of hours just on the proposal. That's why qualification matters more than nurture: every wasted hour on a low-probability lead is an hour stolen from a real opportunity. Here's how to qualify probabilistically without being rude about it — including the MQL-to-SQL handover that most teams fudge.