The DeMicco Digest
Grab your headphones and enjoy a mini-podcast version of this blog. Sit back and listen while we walk you through the key points!
Your sales team is running deals through a marketing license, your service team is running tickets through it too, and everyone has quietly gone back to spreadsheets. The software is not broken. It was never the software you needed.
I should say at the outset that my agency implements HubSpot for clients, so I have a stake in this. Agencies like mine also contribute to the problem, which I will get to.
The most useful way to audit a CRM is not to open the settings. It is to sit with the people who use it and ask them to show you how they actually do their job. Not how the process document says they do it. How they do it on a Tuesday. Do that across a company and the same kinds of things surface, the ones no dashboard would show you: a sales rep tracking her pipeline in a project management tool because the CRM “doesn’t work the way we sell.” A service coordinator whose customer replies go to an email inbox instead of back onto the ticket. A renewal list living in a spreadsheet on one person’s desktop because nobody trusts the report. A past-due call list that is not in the system at all.
None of these people are doing anything wrong. Each of them hit a wall inside the software, found a way around it, and kept working. The wall was a licensing boundary, and nobody told them it was there.
Table Of Contents
HubSpot is several products wearing one logo
This is the thing that gets missed at purchase time, and it is not unique to HubSpot. Salesforce has the same structure. So does Zoho and so does Microsoft Dynamics. Modern CRM platforms are built as a shared database with separate applications on top, and each application is designed around a different object and a different job.
Hub | Built around | The job it was designed for | What you are missing if you run this job without it |
|---|---|---|---|
Marketing Hub | Contacts and campaigns | Attract and nurture: email, forms, landing pages, ads, lead scoring, contact-based automation | If you only have this, you have the front door and not much behind it |
Sales Hub | Deals and leads | Pipeline management, sequences, quotes, meeting booking, forecasting, lead-pipeline automation, rep-level reporting | Reps get a spreadsheet’s worth of pipeline with none of the follow-up automation, so they build their own system elsewhere |
Service Hub | Tickets | Help desk, shared inbox that keeps replies on the ticket, SLAs, ticket routing and escalation, feedback surveys, customer portal | Customer replies leak into email, nothing escalates, and “was this resolved?” becomes a question nobody can answer |
Data Hub (Operations) | The data itself | Integrations, data sync, cleanup and formatting automation, quality rules | Every integration becomes a manual export, and the duplicates I wrote about two weeks ago multiply |
A few boundaries worth knowing, from HubSpot’s own documentation as of this writing. Workflows, the automation engine most people think of as “HubSpot,” require a Professional or Enterprise tier of at least one hub. Sequences, the tool that sends a rep’s personal follow-up emails on a schedule, is a Sales Hub feature. Lead-pipeline automation is Sales Hub Professional and above. Ticket automation and service-level agreements live in Service Hub. HubSpot also moved to a seat-based model, which means the question is no longer just which hub you own but who in the building has a paid seat in it.
One caveat I want on the record: HubSpot repackages its tiers regularly, and the specifics above will drift. Do not take licensing details from a blog post, including this one. Take them from HubSpot’s pricing page and knowledge base on the day you make the decision.
How companies end up with the wrong one
It is almost never a bad decision. It is a good decision that was never revisited.
Marketing signed the first contract
The website needed forms. The newsletter needed a platform. Someone in marketing evaluated options and bought Marketing Hub, which was exactly right for that job. Two years later, sales and service were told to use “the CRM” without anyone re-reading what had been purchased.
The free features looked like the paid ones
HubSpot’s free CRM includes a deal pipeline and a ticket pipeline. They work. They are also the entry-level version of tools whose real value is in the automation, sequencing, and reporting that sit behind the paywall of the relevant hub. A team that starts on the free pipeline assumes it has the product, hits the wall, and blames the product.
The budget lives in one department
If marketing owns the HubSpot line item, marketing renews the hub it uses. Sales Hub seats show up as a new cost in someone else’s budget, and the request dies in the gap between departments. I would bet that gap kills more Sales Hub purchases than any objection to the product itself.
The implementer was a marketing agency
This is where my industry is part of the problem. Agencies like mine come in through the marketing door. We know Marketing Hub cold, and it is natural to configure the account around what we know and to treat sales and service as adjacent. A good implementer asks what every team needs before configuring anything. A busy one configures what they were hired to configure, and the client does not find out the difference for a year.
The renewal never got re-scoped
Annual renewals are the one moment the license can be cheaply rethought, and most companies auto-renew. By the time someone questions the fit, the contract has another eleven months to run.
The symptoms
If three or more of these are true in your company, the diagnosis is probably right.
- Sales reps track their real pipeline somewhere other than the CRM: a spreadsheet, a project tool, a notebook.
- Follow-up is manual. Nobody is enrolled in a sequence; reminders are set by hand or not at all.
- Customer replies to support tickets arrive in someone’s email inbox rather than on the ticket record.
- There is a recurring list (renewals, past-due accounts, quote follow-ups) that is maintained by hand outside the system.
- Leadership cannot get a pipeline or resolution-time report without someone assembling it manually.
- The phrase “HubSpot doesn’t do that” is said regularly, usually about something HubSpot does in a different hub.
- The number of people with a paid seat has no relationship to the number of people who need one.
What it actually costs
The license fee is not the cost. The cost is the workaround. Every shadow spreadsheet is a place where customer data goes to diverge from the system of record. Every manual list is an hour a week of a skilled person’s time doing something the software was built to do. Every reply that leaks out of a ticket is a customer whose problem may or may not have been solved, with no record either way.
Then there is the compounding problem. I wrote two weeks ago that nobody owns the data in most industrial companies. A license mismatch is one of the main reasons. When the tools a team needs are behind a paywall, the team stops entering data into the system, and the system’s data stops being true. At that point, the CRM is not a source of truth. It is a source of the version of events that marketing happened to capture.
There is a subtler cost, and it is the one that concerns me most. When a company concludes that its CRM “doesn’t work,” the next step is usually a platform change. That is a year or more and real money spent solving a problem that was never the platform. The new system will have the same structure, the same hubs, and the same boundaries, and a company that did not learn to match the license to the job the first time will not learn it in the migration.
What to do instead
This is a scoping exercise, not a technical one. An owner or a general manager can run it in a month.
- Map the jobs, not the departments. List the actual work: qualify inbound leads, follow up on quotes, renew members, resolve support requests, run campaigns. Each job maps to an object (contact, deal, ticket) and therefore to a hub.
- Inventory the workarounds. Every spreadsheet, every side tool, every manual list. Each one is a job the licensed software is not doing. Write down what it would take inside HubSpot to do that job, and which hub it lives in.
- Match the license to the job, per team. This is the step people skip because it may mean buying less of one hub and more of another. Sales needs Sales Hub seats for the people who work deals. Service needs Service Hub for the people who work tickets. Marketing may need less than it has.
- Count seats honestly. Who works deals daily? Who works tickets daily? Those people need paid seats in the relevant hub. Everyone else can usually view. Paying for seats nobody uses is as wasteful as denying seats to people who need them.
- Move the workarounds deliberately. Once the right tools are licensed, migrate each shadow process into the system one at a time, with the person who built the workaround leading the move. They know where the bodies are buried.
- Time it to the renewal. Most HubSpot agreements are annual. Ninety days before renewal is when this analysis has leverage. Ninety days after is when it has none.
- Name the data owner. A license that finally fits will not stay clean without one. See the previous post
A word to the associations reading this
In my experience, trade and professional associations are the most frequent victims of this mismatch, and I do not think that is an accident. An association runs marketing, membership sales, event sales, sponsorship sales, and member service, often with a dozen staff and a legacy association-management system doing invoicing on the side. The temptation is to make one HubSpot license do all of it. The result is usually a Marketing Hub account with five departments’ worth of workarounds bolted to the outside. The scoping exercise above applies exactly, and the honest answer may be two hubs, a smaller marketing footprint, and a real conversation with whoever owns the budget.
The software was never the problem. The purchase decision was right for the person who made it, on the day they made it. The mistake was assuming that decision would keep being right for everyone else. Revisit it, one team at a time, and the platform you already pay for will start to look like the one you thought you were buying.
Sources & Further Reading
The following resources informed this article. All claims have been verified against multiple sources where possible.
- HubSpot Knowledge Base, “Automate your processes” – https://knowledge.hubspot.com/get-started/automate-your-processes
- HubSpot pricing page – https://www.hubspot.com/pricing
- HubSpot Knowledge Base, seats overview (search “HubSpot seats” in the knowledge base for the current article)
- HubSpot product pages: Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub – https://www.hubspot.com/products/marketing ; https://www.hubspot.com/products/sales
Joe DeMicco is the Founder and President of Amplify Industrial Marketing + Guidance (AIMG), a full-service B2B industrial marketing agency with 30+ years serving manufacturers, fabricators, distributors, and trade associations. He is also the founder of Industrial Web Search (IWS), a keyword-driven B2B supplier directory platform. Joe teaches the marketing module for the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program and writes about AI, marketing, and B2B strategy at demicco.com.
FAQ
What is the difference between HubSpot Marketing Hub and Sales Hub?
Can a sales team use HubSpot with only a Marketing Hub license?
Partially. HubSpot’s free CRM includes a basic deal pipeline that any account can use. Sales-specific tools such as sequences, lead-pipeline automation, quotes, and forecasting are Sales Hub features, and workflows require a Professional or Enterprise tier of at least one hub. Teams without those tools usually build manual workarounds outside the system.
