Hubspot CRM: The Best Tool for B2B SMEs

In a world where automation, data, and efficiency are key to success, choosing the right CRM has become one of the most important decisions a company can make. But we’re not just talking about storing contacts and scheduling emails: we’re talking about managing relationships, optimizing processes, and making intelligent decisions with real-time information. And this is where Hubspot CRM comes into play. 

For years, I’ve tried different customer relationship management tools. Some very technical, others with so many features that it seemed you needed a master’s degree just to get started. And others, honestly, fell short. Until I discovered Hubspot CRM. Since then, it has become a key piece for coordinating my marketing and sales teams, automating repetitive tasks, and having clear visibility of the sales funnel and customer communication. In this article, I’ll tell you why. 

I’m going to explain what makes Hubspot CRM so special, what its most useful features are, how it can help you if you’re in an SME or startup, what you should consider if you’re going to implement it and, of course, the strengths and areas that could improve. All from real usage experience and with a results-oriented vision. 

What is Hubspot CRM and why is it revolutionizing customer management? 

When we talk about CRM (Customer Relationship Management), many people think only of a digital notebook to keep customer contacts organized. But the reality goes much further. And Hubspot CRM has been one of the main drivers of changing that perception. 

Hubspot was born as a platform focused on inbound marketing, but has evolved in recent years to become a complete ecosystem of sales, marketing, customer service, and analytics tools. All of this, centralized in a friendly, intuitive interface designed for teams that need to be productive without depending on technology experts. 

The foundation of Hubspot CRM is its advanced contact management, but from there it extends to many features that were previously only available to large corporations. And the best part is that it offers a very complete free plan, with the ability to scale gradually as your business grows. 

What stands out most from the first use is how it centralizes all customer information: from their first visit to your website, through the emails they’ve received, interactions with your sales team, their purchasing decisions, and even their technical support requests. Everything is there, accessible to the teams that need it. 

In our case, we started using it in an SME in the B2B sector. The reality is that, before Hubspot, we lived in a jungle of disconnected tools: an Excel for leads, another for customers, a mailing system, a web analytics panel, and a thousand loose tasks in Trello. Hubspot unified all of that and, honestly, made us feel like we went from amateur to professional overnight. 

And that’s exactly what this CRM offers: professionalization, efficiency, and an overall vision. It not only helps you sell more, but allows you to work better. 

Key Features of Hubspot CRM: Much More Than Contacts 

One of the reasons why Hubspot CRM has gained so much ground against its competitors is the breadth and depth of its features. It’s not just a CRM for storing names, emails, and phone numbers. It’s a comprehensive commercial management platform, designed to align all processes involved in customer acquisition, nurturing, and conversion. 

Below, I’ll explain the most notable features and how we’ve used them in our day-to-day: 

Centralized Contact Management 

Each contact within Hubspot has a super complete profile, where you can see their interaction history: emails sent and received, calls made, meetings scheduled, forms filled out, pages visited, downloads, open support tickets, and more. It’s like having the complete customer timeline in a single view. 

This is amazing when, for example, a lead moves from marketing to the sales team. Instead of starting from scratch, the salesperson can see everything the prospect has done, what they asked, what content they’ve consumed, and adapt their pitch instantly. 

Task Automation and Workflows 

Hubspot allows you to create workflows that automate repetitive actions: from sending an email when someone downloads a lead magnet, to assigning a lead to the right salesperson depending on the country or company size. You can also schedule internal notifications, change the status of an opportunity, or automatically tag contacts based on behaviors. 

We automated things like: 

• Sending welcome and follow-up emails 
• Stage changes in the sales funnel based on activity 
• Reminders for calls or meetings with potential customers 

The result was clear: fewer manual tasks, fewer oversights, and more time to focus on strategy. 

Tracking Commercial Interactions 

Hubspot automatically records: 

• Emails sent from Gmail or Outlook (with plugin) 
• Calls made from the app (with recording and notes) 
• Scheduled meetings (with calendar synchronization) 

This allows you to have complete traceability of the sales team’s actions and analyze which techniques work best. 

Additionally, you can add manual notes, attach documents, record pending tasks, and mark priorities. Everything collaborative and centralized. 

Customizable Dashboards and Reporting 

One of Hubspot’s great strengths is its analysis capacity. You can create dashboards with customized metrics: number of leads per campaign, conversion rate per stage, estimated revenue, performance per salesperson, etc. 

A phrase we repeat a lot in the team is: “We stopped working by intuition and started working with data.” And that was thanks to these dashboards. 

Automation, Analytics, and Efficiency Within Everyone’s Reach 

If there’s something that changes the game in any modern CRM, it’s the ability to automate processes, generate detailed reports and, ultimately, work smarter. This is where Hubspot CRM shines especially, and not just for large companies. In fact, we started using it in an SME with a very small team, and the benefits were immediate. 

Automation to Free Up Time and Scale Effortlessly 

One of Hubspot’s most powerful (and addictive) features is automation. You can create workflows that execute tasks automatically based on conditions you define. And the best part: you don’t need to program anything. 

For example, in our experience: 

We created an automation so that when someone completes a contact form, they receive a personalized welcome email and, if they don’t respond, receive a second reminder after 3 days. 

If the lead visits certain service pages on our website, an alert is triggered to the assigned salesperson. 

When a customer signs a contract, a workflow is activated that automatically generates the task to issue the invoice and sends an internal email to the finance team. 

These types of flows not only improve operational efficiency, but also reduce human errors and ensure a consistent customer experience. 

Performance Reports and Analytics to Make Better Decisions 

Hubspot includes a reporting section that allows you to build custom dashboards. You can combine data from marketing, sales, and customer service to get a 360º view of the business. 

In our case, we use dashboards to answer questions like: 

• Which channel is generating the most real opportunities? 
• What is the closing percentage per salesperson? 
• Where are leads getting stuck in the funnel? 
• Which campaigns have had the best return? 

All of this with visual graphics, comparative tables, and the option to export data. Having this information at the team’s fingertips was a before and after. It allowed us to make data-driven decisions and stop improvising. 

Tasks, Reminders, and Automatic Assignments 

If your team sends many commercial or customer service emails, tools like templates and snippets (reusable text fragments) are lifesavers. We created standard responses for frequently asked questions and personalized follow-up emails that are inserted with one click. 

And sequences? They’re great: you can schedule a chain of automatic emails with defined timing, which is ideal for commercial follow-up. You save time, standardize communication, and maintain a personal touch. 

Templates, Sequences, and Snippets 

If your team sends many commercial or customer service emails, tools like templates and snippets (reusable text fragments) are lifesavers. We created standard responses for frequently asked questions and personalized follow-up emails that are inserted with one click. 

And sequences? They’re great: you can schedule a chain of automatic emails with defined timing, which is ideal for commercial follow-up. You save time, standardize communication, and maintain a personal touch. 

Hubspot CRM for Small Businesses: Democratizing Marketing and Sales 

For a long time, the best sales and marketing tools seemed to be reserved for large corporations. Complex software, prohibitive prices, external consultants, months of implementation… A luxury beyond the reach of many SMEs. 

But Hubspot CRM completely changed the game. 

An Accessible All-in-One Solution 

The first thing to highlight is that Hubspot has a really useful free version, not a demo or something limited to try for two days. We started with that version and were able to: 

• Create and customize our sales pipeline 
• Capture leads from forms on the website 
• Use the email tracking system 
• Have basic analytics on our campaigns 
• Automate simple tasks 

All of this without spending a euro. 

This accessibility allowed us, as an SME, to digitalize without a large initial investment. And as we grew, we activated paid features that we really needed, such as advanced automation and customized reports. 

It’s a system that grows with you, and that’s crucial to avoid oversizing costs when you’re still validating commercial processes. 

Professionalization Without Friction 

Hubspot doesn’t require you to be an engineer or hire one. The interface is visual, friendly, clear. Everything is designed so that business users—marketers, salespeople, managers—can navigate fearlessly. 

I remember perfectly when, before Hubspot, to track the sales funnel we had to update three spreadsheets, cross-reference information in weekly meetings, and send separate emails to pass leads between teams. It was slow, error-prone, and exhausting. 

With Hubspot, we centralized everything, and best of all: we were able to standardize processes without sacrificing agility. Now each lead has its file, each task is assigned, each opportunity has its stage, and the team can see what’s happening in real-time. 

Marketing and Sales Working Together 

In many small companies, marketing and sales teams seem to live in separate worlds. Marketing generates leads, but sales doesn’t follow up. Sales demands quality leads, but marketing doesn’t receive feedback. 

Hubspot breaks down that wall. By centralizing information, sharing tools, and allowing automation of lead transfer, working together becomes natural. 

We noticed it in the first months: salespeople began to better understand where leads came from, and the marketing team could see which campaigns actually translated into sales. Alignment was immediate. 

Think Big, Act Agile 

The most valuable thing of all is that Hubspot gives you an infrastructure worthy of a large company, but with the flexibility that an SME needs. You can move fast, experiment, test, and scale without losing control. 

And, above all, you can project a professional image from the first contact. Your emails, landing pages, flows, follow-up… everything looks like you have a team of 20 people behind you. But you do it with three, thanks to a good tool. 

Smart Integrations: A Platform That Adapts to You 

One of the major headaches that many companies face is having scattered tools that don’t talk to each other. A CRM on one side, an email marketing app on another, a platform for meetings, another for e-commerce, and so on to infinity. The worst part: keeping everything synchronized and without duplicates becomes an odyssey. 

This is where Hubspot CRM makes a differential leap: its ability to integrate with hundreds of external tools easily, without the need for custom developments, and without breaking anything. 

An Open Ecosystem to Connect What You Already Use 

From the first moment, Hubspot offers native integrations with the most used tools by SMEs and startups: 

• Gmail and Outlook (for automatic email tracking) 
• Google Calendar and Office 365 (for meetings) 
• Zoom and Microsoft Teams (for video calls) 
• Slack (for activity notifications) 
• Shopify, Stripe, and WooCommerce (for e-commerce) 
• Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and Google Ads (for campaigns) 

We, for example, connected Hubspot with WordPress and Mailchimp in less than an hour. We also integrated it with our billing system to automate internal notifications and automatically update customer status after purchase. 

The impact was enormous: we saved hours of repetitive tasks and avoided errors from manual entries. Additionally, by having everything synchronized, data flows better and decision-making is much faster and more reliable. 

Integrations via API and with Zapier 

If you use more specific tools, Hubspot also allows integrations via API (for developers) or through Zapier, which is a kind of universal glue for connecting apps without knowing how to program. 

This allows things as useful as: 

• Creating a contact in Hubspot when someone fills out a Typeform form 
• Sending a message to Slack if a lead opens a business proposal 
• Automatically adding a new deal to the pipeline when someone books an appointment via Calendly 

The possibilities are almost endless, and the best part is that you can start with the basics and progress gradually. 

Everything Connected, Everything Under Control 

In summary, Hubspot’s philosophy is that you can use what you already have, but better. It doesn’t seek to replace your favorite tools, but to make them work in a coordinated way. And that, for a growing company, makes the difference between scaling or stagnating. 

Why Hubspot CRM Is More Than Software 

After more than a year using Hubspot CRM in our team, we can say that it’s not just a tool. It’s a new way of working. 

It allowed us to: 

• Organize and visualize our opportunities better 
• Automate tasks without losing the human touch 
• Connect marketing and sales in the same flow 
• Use real data to decide and not just intuition 
• Project a professional image with limited resources 

Yes, it has its learning curve. Yes, some advanced features have a cost. But the quality-price ratio is excellent, and the growth potential is enormous. 

Beyond CRM, Hubspot represents a way of understanding commercial work in the digital era: based on data, customer-centric, and results-oriented. If you’re looking for a tool that accompanies you in growth and helps you sell more and better, without losing your mind or control… Hubspot CRM is, honestly, one of the best decisions you can make.