For years, Chris and I convinced ourselves we didn’t need HubSpot.
We were using Monday.com as our CRM, Mailchimp for email marketing and piecing other tools around them. To be fair, we’re pretty techy and good at making different systems work together, so for quite a while I thought that was fine.
The problem was that it just wasn’t powerful enough for where we wanted the business to go.
And like a lot of small businesses, our software costs kept creeping up.
When your monthly software spend starts to look like the cost of an FTE, you need to be pretty confident that what you’re investing in is doing some serious heavy lifting.
That was the lens I was using.
I looked at HubSpot and saw another significant software cost. I thought we could keep piecing things together ourselves and get most of the same outcome for less.
In hindsight, I was looking at it too narrowly.
I was comparing HubSpot with the individual tools we were already paying for, rather than asking what a properly connected sales and marketing platform could actually do for our growth.
And that was the bit I underestimated.
We kept stretching our existing setup for too long, and then I went even further in the other direction and tried a cheaper all-in-one platform.
For us, that was a disaster.
Eventually, we moved to HubSpot Starter and later upgraded to Marketing Hub Professional.
My main regret is that we didn’t do it earlier.
Not because HubSpot magically transformed the business overnight. It didn’t.
But I was genuinely shortsighted about how powerful it could be as a growth engine for a small, bespoke agency like ours.
Is HubSpot worth it for a New Zealand business?
For many growing Kiwi businesses, yes. HubSpot can be particularly valuable when sales and marketing need to work more closely together, your customer journey is becoming more complex, and disconnected systems are creating unnecessary work.
It still has to justify the investment.
The question I’d ask now isn’t:
“Is HubSpot expensive?”
It’s:
“Is this software going to do enough heavy lifting to justify what we’re spending on it?”
That is the question I wish I’d asked much earlier.
What is HubSpot actually useful for?
HubSpot brings your customer data, sales activity, marketing and automation together in one platform.
Most people still think of HubSpot as a CRM.
That’s certainly part of it. But its real value is having more of the customer journey connected.
Someone might download a guide, open an email, come back to your website, speak to sales and eventually become a customer.
Instead of those interactions living across several different systems, HubSpot can help you see more of that journey in one place.
For a growing business, that can become pretty valuable.
No. HubSpot has become much more accessible to smaller businesses than it used to be.
We’re now seeing founder-led businesses with one to five employees looking at HubSpot Starter because they want to get their CRM and marketing foundations right early.
At the other end, larger organisations may use a combination of its more advanced sales, marketing, service and data tools.
So I wouldn’t make the decision based purely on staff numbers.
I’d look at whether your current systems are starting to create friction.
Are leads sitting in different places?
Are follow-ups being missed?
Does marketing have different information from sales?
Does reporting take far longer than it should?
Do you actually know which marketing activity is generating opportunities?
If those questions are becoming harder to answer, it may be time to look at something more connected.
Has HubSpot become cheaper?
Getting started has become easier and more accessible, but the more advanced parts of HubSpot can still be a significant investment.
That distinction matters.
You don’t need to buy everything HubSpot offers from day one.
For many smaller businesses, Starter can be enough to establish a proper CRM, bring sales and marketing information closer together and develop better habits.
Once you move into more advanced automation, reporting and larger contact databases, costs rise.
So I wouldn’t describe HubSpot as cheap.
I’d ask whether the outcome is worth the cost.
For some businesses, absolutely.
For others, no.
Who is HubSpot a good fit for?
HubSpot tends to work best where customer relationships are valuable, sales and marketing need to work together, and there is enough complexity for better systems to make a real difference.
We see a particularly natural fit in professional services, manufacturing and technology.
Professional services businesses often have longer, more considered buying journeys. Prospects may read content, attend an event, speak to someone in the team and come back months later.
Manufacturers can have long sales cycles, technical buyers, distributors and large numbers of opportunities at different stages.
Technology businesses often need marketing, sales, onboarding and customer communication to work closely together.
The common factor isn’t really industry, though.
It’s growth and complexity.
When is HubSpot not worth it?
HubSpot probably isn’t worth the investment if your customer journey is very simple, you’re not planning to grow, or the economics don’t stack up.
If you work with a handful of clients and know every one of them personally, you may not need a sophisticated CRM.
If nobody in the business wants to own the system, adoption may become a problem.
If you have deliberately built your own operational platform around a specific business workflow, there may be little value in recreating all of that somewhere else.
And if you have a very large marketing database, particularly in ecommerce or the charity sector, you need to look closely at cost.
A professional services business with a few thousand high-value prospects has a very different equation from an organisation emailing hundreds of thousands of contacts.
How should you implement HubSpot?
Start with your business process, not the software.
This is probably the most important advice I can give.
Don’t open HubSpot and immediately start building workflows.
First, map how your business actually works.
Where do leads come from?
Who owns them?
What happens next?
When does something become a genuine sales opportunity?
What information matters?
Where are things falling through the gaps?
Once you understand that, build HubSpot around the process.
Not the other way around.
Why does clean data matter?
Because a new CRM won’t fix bad data. It will simply give your bad data a nicer home.
Clean it before you move it.
Remove duplicates.
Check contact information.
Decide which information is genuinely useful.
And think about what might help you later.
Industry, location, service interest, customer type or company size can all become valuable when you start segmenting audiences, reporting or prioritising opportunities.
A bit of effort upfront makes everything easier later.
How much should you build at the start?
As little as you genuinely need.
We prefer to start with a minimum viable version.
Keep the number of fields, rules and new processes low.
Get the team using the CRM properly.
Make sure it helps them rather than creating more admin.
Then add more sophisticated automation, reporting, segmentation and lead scoring once there is a clear reason to do it.
There is no value in having an incredibly clever CRM that nobody wants to use.
What should you automate in HubSpot?
Automate repetitive work that frees your people to focus on the things that actually move the business forward.
When we look at improving a HubSpot setup, we’re not interested in adding automation for the sake of it.
We look for meaningful improvements.
For one manufacturing organisation of around 100 people, that meant helping the sales team identify the most promising opportunities each week.
We introduced lead scoring and created email journeys that nurtured prospects until they were more ready to engage.
Those journeys achieved stronger conversion rates than the business had seen before.
The value wasn’t the automation itself.
It was helping people spend more time on the right opportunities.
HubSpot has responded well to the rapid development of AI by building more of it directly into the platform and everyday workflows.
For most business owners and marketing managers, the technical detail isn’t particularly important.
The practical questions are.
Can it help a salesperson prepare for a meeting?
Can it surface useful information?
Can it reduce repetitive administration?
Can it make content production more efficient?
Can it help analyse customer information faster?
If AI is doing those things, it’s useful.
If it’s just another shiny feature nobody needs, perhaps less so.
HubSpot Starter or Professional and in what area, marketing, sales, content, service: where should you begin?
Start with the level that solves the problems you have today.
For many small and growing Kiwi businesses, Starter is a sensible place to begin.
Get the CRM right.
Get the team using it.
Bring sales and marketing information together.
Then look at Professional when you have a genuine need for more sophisticated automation, reporting, segmentation or marketing capability.
That is the route we took ourselves.
We upgraded when we knew exactly what we needed the extra capability for.
At that point, the investment became much easier to justify.
So, should your business use HubSpot?
HubSpot deserves serious consideration if your business is growing, sales and marketing need better visibility, or your existing systems are creating too much manual work.
But don’t buy it because it’s well known.
And don’t reject it simply because it costs more than one of the individual tools you use today.
Look at the whole picture.
What does your current setup cost you in subscriptions, integrations, manual reporting, double handling and missed opportunities?
What could a more connected platform help you do better?
For us, that was the part I underestimated.
I spent too long trying to work out whether we could justify the software cost.
The better question was:
“What are our current systems stopping us from doing?”
That’s the question I wish we’d asked much earlier.
About the Author: Jordana Clarke
