Disclaimer: Before I get into why I believe HubSpot is the best CRM for manufacturing and engineering, I would be remiss if I didn’t highlight that FINALLY Agency are HubSpot Platinum partners.

Although there is a natural bias, we also appreciate that HubSpot isn’t a great fit for every business. To that end, I’ve put together my top 3 HubSpot alternative CRMs for Manufacturing and Engineering, which should point you in the right direction.

Now that’s out of the way, let’s get into it.

Why HubSpot’s Free CRM Works for Engineering and Manufacturing

HubSpot is an intuitive, all-in-one business software - designed to help businesses scale.

At its core, the free CRM acts as a comprehensive database management system that is extended by the supplementary — yet extensive — sales, marketing, service, and operations tools.

It sounds great, right?

To dissect the fancy-sounding marketing jargon, the HubSpot CRM is where your contact, sales, and service data lives and is managed. It provides a single place where you can see contact, company, and deal information, alongside a full history of automatically (and manually) tracked interactions.

Why do I need a CRM?

For engineering and manufacturing, relationships will always be key. But having a place to manage that relationship has always been tricky. A lot of the time, it becomes a case of relying on address books or hastily put together spreadsheets.

Having a CRM in place means you can manage the important relationships more efficiently and ditch your outdated address books or spreadsheets overflowing with duplicate entries. Your CRM keeps your contact details in one place and acts as an activity logbook, helping sales teams keep track of their contacts, companies, and deals.

Day-to-day that means your sales team can reduce wasted time on the admin side, and spend more time actually selling.

A good CRM like HubSpot will also be able to update itself, as it should constantly be tracking things like when a contact clicks through to your website and the pages they visit. This can help you understand what they are interested in and mean you can be more targeted with your conversations.

Why HubSpot?

As I mentioned, the CRM is at HubSpot’s core, and additional “Hub” subscriptions unlock features (depending on the subscription level), such as sales and marketing automation, a knowledge base, comprehensive chatbots, and more.

Using the data contained in the CRM, they allow you to craft a better journey for your prospects and leads and deliver a better, more up-to-date customer experience.

A good way is to think of the CRM as the heart of your HubSpot portal, while the Marketing, Sales, Service, and Operations Hubs are separate organs that each have their own important jobs.

Marketing Hub

At the free level, the HubSpot Marketing Hub allows you to build campaign landing pages that convert prospects to leads with gated content, or send bulk emails to a segmented list of contacts from your database.

As you increase your subscription level, more features are unlocked, such as timely automations that are triggered by contact actions, such as a form submission, web page visit, or hitting a specific lead score.

Sales Hub

With the free sales tools, you can manage deals more efficiently through a visualised sales pipeline. This not only helps you keep on top of your deals in progress, but can help identify bottlenecks in your processes.

Increasing your subscription level unlocks tools like the product library, quoting, sales email sequences, revenue forecasting, custom objects, and sales playbooks.

Service Hub

Free service tools allow you to provide comprehensive chat support via your website, manage tickets in a dedicated pipeline, and make sure your customers are properly serviced.

On the higher subscription levels, you can route tickets to specific teams and agents, deploy customer feedback surveys, and access advanced reporting metrics.

Operations Hub

HubSpot’s latest release addition is the Operations Hub, which allows for data synchronisation between HubSpot and a third-party at the free level.

At a paid level, you unlock custom code integrations, which means you can extend HubSpot to connect with any external API. This could be used to automate things like production schedules through an API connection with your ERP, or copy important closed/won deal information from HubSpot to another system for invoicing.

In Summary:

Relationships have and will always be at the core of engineering and manufacturing. The businesses that succeed in the sector are the ones who are focused on delivering for their customers, and keeping those customers happy.

HubSpot is a great fit for engineering and manufacturing companies because it is focused on helping businesses manage those contact relationships more effectively. It’s also easy to use, designed to scale with the company, can be extended with free tools designed to boost efficiency across the business, and can connect with external software.

If you’re interested in taking a closer look at HubSpot, get in touch, or connect with me on LinkedIn where I share posts about HubSpot, email marketing, automation, and all things inbound.