What is business automation? When you create a framework to capture and render information at the right time for the right function to happen in an automated manner without any kind of manual intervention, then you have successfully carried out business automation. When you are running a business – especially a small or mid-sized business – you are often hard-pressed for manpower. These kinds of businesses are not able to employ a large staff or even put together very large or highly skilled teams. Often, small business owners have to make do with whatever talent they can find and even more often, many team members including the business owner can be seen multitasking. This is where the need for tools and technologies like CRM and automation come into play.
When we speak of CRM and business automation, the first name that springs to mind is HubSpot. Since its inception in 2006, this brand has created a technology that has quickly gone mainstream. CRM along with business automation has pretty much changed the way the world does business. Every enterprise worth its salt has employed some or the other form of CRM and automation. While many have gone the HubSpot route, there are many businesses that are now being serviced by HubSpot alternatives. Many of these HubSpot competitors are doing a fine job of offering many more features at a fraction of the cost and with more support, while others are catering to certain niches like real estate or tech. This is what makes all the difference when one is trying to choose the best CRM platform.
Before we talk about the top 4 HubSpot alternatives for your business automation needs, let us understand how business automation can help you. To begin with, we need to understand that automation can happen on the sales side and the marketing side as well, with the strong base of CRM to fill in the blanks with the right information and data for the relevant functions, at the right time. Here are the ways in which business automation can help your business:
Accuracy: When you are running a business, you would aim at accuracy at all costs so that you hit the bull’s eye. This bulls eye can be understanding the customer, or getting the right insights to alter and improve your strategy, or even crunching the right data for a certain campaign. The level of accuracy will determine how far you are able to take you vision for your business and its growth. The accuracy level will also have a bearing on the efficiency of your sales and marketing teams.
Satisfaction: Whether it is your employee or a customer, you should bring in a HubSpot alternative in order to automate the various functions within your business. This would help in automating the monotonous tasks that would otherwise eat into the bandwidth of your teams. In turn, you would have happier employees who get to indulge their core skills by engaging with the customer and being a part of more meaningful functions. Also, with automation, you would be able to get instant notifications about the queries and problems that your customers may be facing. And since your bandwidth would be readily available, you can act on the same immediately so as to satisfy your customer and ensure that there is plenty of positive word of mouth going around for some crucial brand loyalty.
Collaboration: This is a very important function that needs to be seamlessly aligned so that your business is able to leverage the positive results of the same. When there is good collaboration between the members of the sales and marketing teams, as well as the third-party vendors whom you deal with, you will be able to deliver the goods in a far better manner. The collaboration would then ensure that there is less room for chaos, confusion and duplication of tasks as well as missing out on essential functions due to any of the above.
Analysis: One of the best things about automation with a HubSpot competitor is that at the end of the process and the period that you would have set, you will receive a complete analysis of what you have done right, the things you have done wrong, and how and where you can improve. These are crucial findings that will take your business further. With the right insights rendered at the right time, you will be able to make fewer mistakes and hit the bull’s eye more often!
Now that we have established the various benefits of business automation, it is time to cast a glance on the top 4 HubSpot alternatives that you can use for the same:
1. EngageBay: This platform is one of the most reputed that also offers you plenty of features for omnichannel automation and presence with data-driven techniques and campaigns. Further, the sophisticated analysis tools will help you fine-tune your game. The pricing and support features are also at par with the best in the business.
2. FreshMarketer: This is also a well known HubSpot competitor that can help you automate your business functions and the way you capture and align information. The downside is that it is an expensive tool that requires many other integrations onto the main platform.
3. PipeDrive: This platform offers good email marketing integrations that can automate that side of your business. Yet, it does not offer much else in terms of other integrative features.
4. LeadSquared: This HubSpot alternative is a lead and sales-centric one that helps you generate and nurture leads so that you can concentrate on making sales and conversions. It is not as data-driven as EngageBay and hence, not the best option for business automation.
The above comparison shows that EngageBay is a clear winner in terms of its wide range of features which are affordable and with plenty of support for setup.