HubSpot Is a Vendor of Merit in Customer Experience Management

We are happy to share some insights about HubSpot drawn from our latest Value Index research, the 2023 Ventana Research Value Index: Customer Experience Management, which assesses how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements.

In all of our Value Indexes, we utilize a structured research methodology built on evaluation categories designed to reflect real-world criteria and derived from RFP responses and a vendor selection process for analytics and business intelligence. We evaluated HubSpot and 21 other vendors in seven categories, five relevant to the product — Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability — and two related to the vendor — TCO/ROI and Vendor Validation. To arrive at the Value Index rating for a given vendor, we weighted each category to reflect its relative importance in an RFP process, with the weightings based on our experience and on data derived from our Benchmark Research on Customer Experience (CX).

HubSpot develops applications that center around a CRM platform, with features that extend the tool beyond record-keeping into marketing automation, sales analysis and customer support. It was categorized as a Vendor of Merit, ranking 22nd overall in this Value Index evaluation. HubSpot performed best in Capability, where it ranked 14th.

HubSpot has followed a model of knitting together components (called “Hubs”) targeted at users in marketing, sales and service, as well as an ecosystem of developers, to provide a broader range of features and the integrations needed to connect its Hubs to other enterprise software systems. It has also built specialized applications, like a content management system and its Operations Hub, which serve to unify data resources and provide some workflow automation features.

HubSpot’s platform supports the key Capability areas needed for customer experience management (CXM or CEM) but has limited functionality that hinders its usefulness as a complete enterprise CXM platform. Its operational resource management lags in providing planning and analytic tools for managers, for example, and it needs to provide users with more details and assistance in managing complex artificial intelligence (AI) and workflow automation tasks. HubSpot could improve its Product Experience ranking by revealing more of its roadmap and investment decisions. It should also provide more granular details about the hands-on workings of each of its Hubs and how they join to create a unified CX process.

This assessment was based on HubSpot’s CXM products available in October of 2022.

HubSpot, like all vendors in this space, should continue working towards a holistic, integrated CX platform that addresses the needs of users across the enterprise. Connecting workflows from marketing, sales and service teams should be a key priority.

This research-based index is the most comprehensive assessment of the value of CXM software in the industry. Technology buyers can learn more about how to use our Value Index by clicking here and included vendors that wish to learn more can click here. Read the report here.