SharpSpring won us over from HubSpot with a simple ROI demonstration
February 06, 2017
SharpSpring won us over from HubSpot with a simple ROI demonstration
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SharpSpring
SharpSpring is being used by our organization both internally, and as a platform, we provide our clients with marketing automation and inbound marketing. Having used other platforms such as HubSpot in the past, we simply haven't found an easier or more cost effective solution for email marketing, contact, and list management, landing page creation, lead nurturing and even the included sales CRM. As it allows for user roles, we can configure it for sales, admins, managers and even do the same for our clients (with roles relevant to them). Each user level sees only the screens and functions necessary for them to do their job, but all of the data stays up to date and available.
Pros
- Marketing automation is the meat and potatoes of SharpSpring. This can mean different things to different people, so the flexibility to do many different things well is important. We use it for way too many things to list, but some of the more important include sending a follow-up thank you email when someone re-visits our website or fills out a contact form, notifying a salesperson when a contact visits a particular web page so we can follow-up AND, manage our quickly growing contact list by segmenting (automatically based on rules we've created) and creating sub-lists and nurturing those leads with customized emails.
- Landing page builder is a relatively new feature, but a welcome one. Yet again SharpSpring has added functionality within the platform that is seamlessly integrated that required us to use different software and tools before.
- Visitor ID is a unique feature to SharpSpring and one that particularly intrigued us as we were shopping for an alternative to our old provider, HubSpot. By capturing unique IP addresses and providing as much information about them as possible, we are able to tell where, when and how often a potential lead interacts with our site (as can our clients on the platform). This valuable intelligence allows us to customize the visitor experience and engage much sooner than would normally be possible.
Cons
- If you'd have asked me two years ago what areas of SharpSpring needed improvement it would have been an easier task than today. The first would have been customer service as the company was growing quickly and I believe this was manifested in slower than hoped customer service/support for us as a new client. The good news is that this has been fixed through a couple of major reorganizations over the last year or so.
- A wish list might include real time traffic numbers a la Google, as opposed to overnight updating as occurs now. We recognize that the reality of this is challenging and largely unnecessary, but I'm struggling to find things that SharpSpring does not do well after being a satisfied client for two years.
- As I've mentioned previously the positive impact on ROI was immediate due to the cost being about 10% of what we had been paying with HubSpot for all of the features we needed.
- For us as an agency, having a platform with such a low incremental cost, allowed us to offer sophisticated marketing automation to clients that could not have afforded it while HubSpot was our partner.
We have used HubSpot before and were a partner for about the same amount of time that we have now been on SharpSpring. It was simply a case of now knowing what we didn't know. HubSpot did an outstanding job for us and our clients, but it came with a hefty price tag. Once we realized that SharpSpring existed, and did a thorough demo and vetting of the product, it quickly became clear that our business opportunities would be great with a more cost effective, yet still feature rich toolset. SharpSpring has absolutely provided that.
Comments
Please log in to join the conversation