7Sheep vs. HubSpot Marketing Hub

I use 7Sheep for marketing as a sales person. This works well for me as a single user. I do not think I could use the software together with my colleagues. Although we could have separated lists the access rights might not fit our use case. It has a strong marketing focus and cannot replace a full CRM system.

As I said previously, I was not a fan at the beginning because, like everyone, I don't take change so well. Once I started following leads through HubSpot Marketing Hub, I integrated it with my email and created templates for what I needed, I started to see the positives immediately. My time working was better spent as I eliminated time put in routine tasks. I was able to track all communication in HubSpot Marketing Hub, we created systems in the office assigning tasks to one another and, through HubSpot Marketing Hub, our leads were able to book meetings in my calendar automatically. To be honest, if you are in sales and marketing, I cannot think of scenarios where HubSpot Marketing Hub cannot help. All I would like to say is, when using templates, pay attention to where you send them - you may need some personalization. I would encourage the management of HubSpot Marketing Hub to create short tutorials for beginners like me who need to configure and start using various features: setting up deals, templates, and dashboards.

Incentivized

• Affordability: the only solution we found on the market that gave us what we needed at a price we can afford!
• Flexibility: 7Sheep seems to offer enough flexibility in the advance features that we can customise it as we need.
• It's easy enough for our whole team to be able to use.
• Their team is helpful and supportive.

• A/B testing has been really effective for our landing pages and emails.
• Adding our website to Hubspot has made it easier to make fast changes and get quality data and insights.
• Emails are easy to create and share between teams to get feedback and collaborate on.

Incentivized

• The personalized tags cannot be accessed from the menu/page you create your emails. I get around this by opening two windows, but in the future this might be an improvement.
• I needed to create custom reports in order to get the overview on the campaigns that I needed. More generic reporting would be a useful feature.
• I would like to be able to duplicate e-mail campaigns across different activities/databases. I could set up a mailing template for this but sometimes it would be good to be able to just re-create a particular campaign that we received a good response to for another, entirely different, activity.

• It is less about HubSpot as a platform and more about the app, but I wish they were able to bring a bit more functionality to the app such as being able to schedule posts. It would make trade shows much easier.
• I wish the template designs were easier to make changes to because without CSS knowledge they can be complex to adjust. Many other sites have more user-friendly designs and this one is very rigid and sometimes hard to adjust.
• While I love HubSpot Academy, I wish it listed out your current courses versus having to search for them. It would help remind me which ones I need to finish.

Incentivized

The tool serves our needs and we like the user interface. The few times we contacted support they were super helpful and responsive. When we asked for more integrations they confirmed the integrations we need (e.g. Hipchat) for the near future.

I've been using Hubspot for about 6 years off and on but I highly recommend it as a CMS, especially with co workers all over the United States who need a one stop shop to find customer information and teamwork activities on Deals and Tasks.

Incentivized

It is easy to use and if I do have a problem or question I receive an answer almost immediately.

While there are some frustrating things that pop up unexpectedly ("wait... I can't do X?"), I have found HubSpot to be easy to use and extremely helpful to my daily work. The documentation is really good, and when it's not helpful, the support staff have been amazing.

Incentivized

They have had issues with system availability over the course of days. Sometimes the system is unusable, other times updates simply take a long time to show up. It's better now but, from a reliaibility standpoint, HubSpot is not Salesforce.com yet. Still great software though.

With all the new features in HubSpot, the system can get a tad slow sometimes... That said, most of the time it is lightning fast and I have no problems. Because most of the integrations are API, they silently work in the background. I have not had trouble with lag due to HubSpot integration

With both chat and email support I have always had enough ways to get through to them! Their support is good, honest and most importantly supportive. They helped us set up and start using the tool when we got stuck. Moving from Mailchimp where there were some semantic lessons to learn and they took the time to help us get used to 7Sheep

During the few times I've needed it, HS support has been accessible, helpful and efficient. Often rolling up their sleeves to make changes for you as opposed to leaving you with a list of instructions to decipher on your own.

I did the 2-day classroom at HubSpot's corporate office in Cambridge. First off, it was amazing to see their corporate office in general. They have such a cool office environment. But it was also great to have the ability to learn in a workshop format with other HubSpot users and meet my Account Manager/ Inbound Marketing Consultant in person.

I went through Inbound Marketing University in 2006. Great training and helped my transition from traditional (outbound) marketing to inbound marketing that I've been able to apply to a number of businesses from wastewater and water reuse, to professional services and SaaS. Share information of value to build awareness and trust. Answer customers' questions in a transparent way to generate more qualified leads. Understand the difference between a marketing qualified lead and a sales qualified lead and put together a lead nurturing program. Your sales and marketing efforts will see significant ROI.

My biggest piece of advice for those who are implementing Hubspot is that you need to devote the time up front and learn how to use the product. Once you learn how to use Hubspot, it will be much more effective as well as much easier to use in the long run

I've used MailChimp before and I liked their product as well, however, data protection is key in our organization. As we are working in multiple countries, some of which have very strict data protection laws, and it was important that we kept the data stored on servers in Europe. MailChimp's servers are in the US, as is the case for many other similar companies. That alone was a major reason for us to go with 7Sheep, which is a European company that keeps all data stored on servers in Europe

Other competing software such as Zoho and Boomtown may have more bells and whistles, but it is too cumbersome and has many parts that only advanced users can operate. With HubSpot, each function is within reach of the average agent. It doesn't overpromise and then makes you feel incompetent when you can't use it all...

Incentivized

HubSpot is addressing this more and more. Currently you can assign tasks to designated sales teams, which grow as you grow. They've added free baseline products for those just getting started. These and more contribute to the scalability of HubSpot - so I gave it an 8 and am hoping for more in the future!

• I was previously part of a survey with 7Sheep and results showed that we were saving 20 mins per participant per event we held, a working week for an event of 100 people.
• Automating our operational logic with the admin triggers in 7Sheep means there is no time lag between tasks and teams, certainly greater efficiency.
• Tracking engagement on our site and with our outbound campaigns means better and faster reporting and enables us to report on impact in a more quantifiable way. (On the human side, my team members get positive feedback from our target audiences which is very motivating. It is nice to see data backed up by people.)

• Ads - built-in ROI measurement in HubSpot's Ads to help improve ad optimization.
• Workflows - opened the door to automate some processes at scale.
• Campaigns - some room for improvement here. It could be a knowledge gap, but we've found that having email opens as a default engagement that's part of campaign performance muddies the waters on what actually is working in campaigns.

Incentivized