So, you’ve identified that you want to move to an inbound strategy for your business and are looking to justify the cost of a platform like HubSpot or Marketo? Afterall, it’s a big investment to make and an even bigger transformation for the business. So, it will require more justification than other projects.

We get many customers and prospects asking us if HubSpot is worth buying and our initial response is often ‘not yet’! It’s not that HubSpot isn’t a great solution- As a Certified Solution Partner we see the value that it provides to our customers every day. However, in reality, we find that customers are not quite ready to benefit from everything that HubSpot has to offer and need some additional help to prepare themselves for Inbound success.

#Get started with Inbound for Free

We know that Inbound is a more helpful and human approach to growing your business. By attracting, engaging, and delighting people, it provides value and builds trust with the customers that are central to helping your business to grow. With that in mind, here’s a great way to get started with Inbound for free:

If your customer is central to your growth, your CRM needs to become a single source of truth, for everyone across the business, to access and share. Marketing, Sales and Service teams will all need to contribute as they work together to delight customers, under your new strategy. The good news here is that free doesn’t always mean that it lacks functionality.

HubSpot CRM is free to use and it’s the same product that’s included when you buy other tools within their platform. We’d recommend this over other free CRM products (and in the majority of cases the ones you pay for as well).

Ready to get to know your customers even better? Book a free call with one of our Inbound Consultants. In just 20 minutes, we can help you to establish clear goals for your inbound strategy and offer more useful tips on how to get started, before committing to HubSpot, or any other paid inbound tools.  

#Add a free live chat tool to your website

Today’s buyers want information — and they want it now. Use live chat to automatically connect visitors to the right people on your team: Route customers to your services team, and pass leads to the salesperson who owns that relationship.

Starting free conversations with your prospects is a fantastic way to understand who is interested in what you have to offer and what attracts them to you.

With free live chat becoming an essential element of your Inbound strategy, HubSpot offer a great solution, where all your chat conversations are automatically stored in a universal inbox enriched with data from HubSpot’s free CRM -  giving everyone on your team the context they need to craft the perfect response.

Respond to chats directly from the conversations inbox. Then make follow-up a breeze by taking notes, sending emails, making calls, scheduling follow-up tasks, creating support tickets, and more — right from the inbox.

As you develop your Inbound strategy further, this information becomes the basis of your Buyer Personas and helps us to map the customer journey. However, as you get started with Inbound, you can begin by collecting data and increasing your understanding of who buys from your business.   And, by the way, don’t forget that your employees should be registering all this information in your new CRM!    

#Add a free ChatBot

Your visitors, prospects, and customers expect to connect with you in real time via live chat. But for most companies, supporting one-to-one conversations on a larger scale can be a challenge.

With HubSpot’s free chatbot software, you can lighten the load for your team. Easily create bots that help you qualify leads, book meetings, provide answers to common customer support questions, and more — so your team has more time to focus on the conversations that matter most.

In fact, Bots are starting to replace forms, as the best way to engage with online visitors. Think about it as an automated assistant for common customer requests, which then asks for contact details, so your business can follow up and keep in touch! It’s easy to create and customise chatbots yourself — with the right software. Configure your bot to hand the conversation off to a live agent once qualified, create support tickets, add users to lists and workflows, and more.

Get access to the latest HubSpot CRM Free tools with Bud

So, as you can see, getting started with Inbound tools can help prepare your business to maximise the investment from paid tools. We recommend the free tools from HubSpot because they actually work for our customers. They integrate together and form a foundation for Inbound that provides long term value.  Signing up is easy, but getting the most out of the tools, from day one, can be a challenge. Here are just some of the stages that you will need to go through:-

• Importing existing customer and prospect data 
• Sync sales email with contact records 
• Set up calendar integration 
• Establish deal stages
• Website Chat and Chat bot set up 

Alternatively, you can register now and let Bud help you to get up and running.

This offer is perfect for those who want some free assistance to to get started with HubSpot.  Use our inbound experts, to help with setup and integration. We'll provide project templates and advice on all the things you need to get started with HubSpot.