TL;DR
- Legacy CRMs hold businesses back with disconnected data, low adoption, and slow results.
- HubSpot Smart CRM unifies your data, teams, and tech stack for faster insight and a holistic customer view.
- Three core pillars power growth:
- Unified customer data offers a single, reliable source of truth.
- Intuitive design drives high team adoption and easy collaboration.
- Rapid implementation means you’re up and running in just 6 weeks.
- “Smart” means AI-driven insights, time-saving automation, and effortless personalisation at every touchpoint.
- Dynamic features like self-generating data, customisable views, and smart insights empower better decisions.
- Ideal for businesses upgrading from clunky CRMs, seeking a scalable, affordable entry into HubSpot’s ecosystem.
- At Spitfire Inbound, we see HubSpot Smart CRM as the foundation for connected, efficient, intelligent growth, where technology becomes a catalyst for growth, not a barrier.
The world of customer relationship management has fundamentally changed. Gone are the days when a CRM was a simple digital directory or who’s who of your company's contacts. Today, businesses need a system that can automate, unify, cleanse, and enrich data to provide a single view of the customer. Yet, many companies find themselves held back by traditional or legacy CRMs that are often clunky, lead to slow implementation and poor user adoption, and ultimately leave you with an incomplete and unreliable picture of your customers - impacting effective communication and subsequently impacting their experience of not only your team but also your brand.
This data disconnection creates significant challenges. When your customer data is fragmented or incomplete, marketing struggles with meaningful segmentation, sales misses visibility of ongoing communications and subsequently, key opportunities, and service agents are forced to repeat themselves, leading to disjointed and frustrating customer experiences.
Having witnessed this challenge firsthand as an Elite HubSpot Partner, we've also identified the solution. HubSpot is revolutionising business-customer connections in this new intelligent era with its standalone Smart CRM. It offers a fresh approach, transforming complexity into simplicity and providing seamless unification where other tools fall short.
The Three Pillars: Unifying your business for growth
HubSpot's Smart CRM is built on three core pillars that directly address the shortcomings of traditional systems. It’s designed to be the central nervous system that unifies your entire go-to-market operation.
- Unify Customer Data: The Smart CRM excels at creating a single, reliable source of truth. By automatically capturing every customer interaction in one place, you can build a complete picture of your audience. This creates connected data, which allows your teams to deliver effortless, personalised customer experiences. HubSpot notes that 59% of HubSpot users report having a more unified view of their customers than non-HubSpot users.
- Unify Teams (Easy to Use): A CRM is only effective if your team uses it. HubSpot tackles the challenge of poor adoption by creating an intuitive platform that is simple to learn and easy to use. With shared data and insights, teams can collaborate more effectively and solve for the customer faster. This is why 79% of users say HubSpot is easy to use.
- Unify Tech Stacks (Fast Time to Value): A modern business relies on a suite of tools, and your CRM must be the central hub. The Smart CRM is built to bring your systems and tools together, helping you drive faster results. Through powerful process automation, businesses accelerate efficiency and value. Instead of spending months or years on implementation, HubSpot customers report an average time of just 6 weeks to fully operationalise a product.
What makes HubSpot's CRM "Smart"?
The "smart" in Smart CRM signifies a platform infused with artificial intelligence growth capabilities to propel your business forward. HubSpot's Smart CRM provides the unified data foundation necessary for AI to deliver a durable impact.
HubSpot AI leverages your unified data to:
- Provide Actionable Intelligence: Get ahead of issues with proactive error identification, data enrichment, and embedded analytics that surface insights before you know to look for them.
- Generate Process Automation: Let AI create workflows and recommend tools based on your business goals, freeing up your team to focus on high-impact activities.
- Deliver Personalised Experiences: Use AI-powered tools to turn prospects into pipeline and start relevant, contextual conversations at scale.
When to consider a standalone Smart CRM
The standalone Smart CRM is a strategic and accessible entry point to the HubSpot ecosystem, especially for businesses that:
- Are migrating from a clunky, traditional CRM and need a platform that is easy to adopt and delivers fast results.
- Need to establish a single source of truth for customer data before scaling marketing or sales efforts.
- Are looking for a cost-effective, powerful CRM foundation with a lower barrier to entry. The Professional tier starts at just $50/€49 per month.
- Want a platform that can grow with them. Start with the CRM and seamlessly add Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, or other HubSpot products as your needs evolve.
New features now available in the HubSpot Smart CRM
Flexible CRM views where users will be able to visualise the same data in multiple formats, and not only the rigid table format. This will include charts, boards and timelines.
Sales reps will be able to see pipeline momentum in visual flows, while marketing will be able to track funnel performance in conversion charts. This visual representation will ensure that patterns and trends jump out immediately.
Self-Generating CRM Data
In the past, your CRM was only as smart as the data you fed it. Now, your CRM will learn from three powerful sources: HubSpot’s data sets, smart properties, and every call or email conversation. This allows real-time context to flow in automatically. You finish a sales call, and your data is captured.
*Smart property is an AI field that populates itself based on customer behaviour.
Smart Insights
This is your personal business analyst that never sleeps. This includes
- AI catch-up cards for company records, which will surface customer sentiment changes and flag missing data directly on the company record. You will see this tab on your central panel. Currently, you will see Breeze Summary, but this will expand (Professional+)
- Smart Digest notifications to alert you to performance shifts or trends that emerge (Starter+)
- Column Insights, which will explain what the data pattern means on a right-click, giving you clarity (Starter+)
At Spitfire Inbound, we believe that technology should be a catalyst for growth, not a barrier. The standalone Smart CRM from HubSpot supports this philosophy as being the foundation for a more connected, efficient, and intelligent business. By starting with a solid CRM foundation, you can unlock immediate value and explore further opportunities to grow your business - while maintaining meaningful interactions with your customers.
Contact Us to see how our experts can partner with you to transform your CRM experience and accelerate business growth.
FAQs About HubSpot Smart CRM
What is customer relationship management?
Customer relationship management (CRM) is the practice of capturing, managing, and optimising every interaction your business has with its leads and customers. A smart CRM (like HubSpot Smart CRM) goes a step further, leveraging artificial intelligence growth to unify customer data, automate processes, and deliver a personalised customer experience at scale.
What is HubSpot Smart CRM?
HubSpot Smart CRM is a next-generation smart CRM platform that transforms customer relationship management by unifying data, teams, and tools. With built-in artificial intelligence growth capabilities, process automation, and a focus on delivering a personalised customer experience, HubSpot Smart CRM is truly a catalyst for growth.
How does HubSpot Smart CRM help with customer data unification?
HubSpot Smart CRM simplifies customer relationship management by capturing every customer interaction in one place, giving you a single source of truth. This unification unlocks better segmentation, sharper sales insights, and smoother service delivery.
Why is user adoption higher with HubSpot Smart CRM?
Thanks to its playful and intuitive design, HubSpot Smart CRM crushes the “nobody likes using the CRM” stereotype. Teams love how easy it is to learn, making customer relationship management and process automation part of everyone’s daily routine (no tech headaches required).
How does HubSpot Smart CRM improve CRM ROI?
Smart CRM delivers AI-powered actionable insights, swift process automation, and a truly personalised customer experience, helping your business grow faster, serve better, and achieve an impressive return on investment.
What makes the CRM “Smart”?
It’s all about artificial intelligence growth and smart process automation. Features like predictive analytics, AI-driven recommendations, and self-updating properties ensure your CRM actively helps you win.
How quickly can I get started with HubSpot Smart CRM?
You’ll go from “we need a CRM” to “wow, look at these personalised customer experiences!” in about six weeks, outpacing the slowpoke legacy systems every time.
When should I consider getting HubSpot’s Smart CRM?
It’s perfect for businesses leaving clunky CRMs, needing a single source of truth, or seeking a cost-effective, scalable entry into HubSpot’s ecosystem (from just $50/€49 p/m).
