Why HubSpot is not for SMB/SMEs. Forget about it!

[HubSisNOTforSME]

So, this is my story. I work for a small insurance business and spent the last 3 months to implement HubSpot in the company and after all that effort just realised their rules are actually above the European regulation and clueless on the needs of small to medium sized businesses. 

For e.g, when a SME decides to upgrade their business from excel to a CRM, they are looking to import all their data base to the CRM and to send an email for activation/introduction. In our particular case, we bought a local small business in order to enter the market so obviously you would like to reactivate the data base. YOU CAN NOT! because of the HubSpot robot. He rules everything. But, you would say - It is all legal and supported by the European Regulation on GDPR 2016/679, article 47 - that stipulates that direct marketing for prospecting or to own clients is legal and in the realm of legitimate interest. They do not care, mate! The robot rules. no appeal, nothing. 

So what you do now? You have spent all that time to introduce your new team to the CRM, you praised the service and all that and you now find out that you can not use it because internal regulations are better than European Legislation.

Any other experienced this?

D

[LHeron]

You are correct that Hubspot is not for SME's.  I have been dealing with them about renewing for 2 weeks and they will not allow me to change my subscription.  Do not deal with this company as they do not care about their customers.

I asked to speak to a supervisor and they told me they would phone back within 24 hours.  That was a week ago.  If you want to speak to someone they send you to their calendar to book a time.  BTW the calendar does not work and gives a error message.  They could have had a life long customer but instead have treated our company like **bleep**.

Please go with another CRM

[TreyWaddell]

Hi @LHeron - that sounds frustrating, I'm sorry to hear about your experience. It appears someone on our team reached out to you shortly after this post. 

I will also track down that calendar link that was sent to you and ensure it's working as expected - thank you for flagging that. 

Lastly, while you chat with your success team, do you have any technical hurdles we can help you with with regards to the product? Technical issues, a workflow or use case you're trying to use? We have a lot of folks with varying expertise that would be more than happy to help. 

[JessicaH]

Hi @HubSisNOTforSME,

Thank you for sharing your feedback on the Community.

We apologising for any frustration or business impact importing your data into HubSpot has caused.

I did want to share further resources with you to provide some context as to why HubSpot is functioning this way:

• Terms of Service
• GDPR Compliance

As a note about our product, if you and your entities are working in an area that isn't in the scope of GDPR you have the ability to disable the GDPR functinality in your account.

We appreciate that you've given HubSpot the chance as a CRM for your business, if it isn't the CRM solution for you we wish you all the best. If you have any further questions around HubSpot don't hesitate to ask the Community. We're here to help.

Thank you,
Jessica

[HubSisNOTforSME]

Hi Jessica,

Thanks for taking the time to read my post.

So what you are basically telling me is that you have a rule, if I have more than 5% bounce than my email feature is locked indefinite without appeal because your robot or rules say so. Does HubSpot know that most of the SME does not have up-to-date data bases?

It does not matter for you or your robot if the list I have used is legitimate, contacts are own clients, no one reported spam and the GDPR regulations considers it a legitimate interes to email your clients or even prospects?

Thank you.

D

[DeliveryByJess]

Hello @HubSisNOTforSME ,

HubSpot's acceptable limits are in place to protect individual senders from reputation damage that high rates of negetiave engament (bounces, unsubscribes, spam complaints) as well as to protect HubSpot's shared email sending network from damage and provide all accounts with a fair shot at reaching the primary inbox.  High rates of negative engagement will negatively impact your brand's ability to reach the primary inbox, as these signals train inbox providers to send more of your next message to spam. 

HubSpot requires that all contacts included in marketing email sends have provided your brand with their email address and verifiable permission to be sent promotional email,  and the opt in requirements will often be more stringernt than local privacy legislation like GDPR.  These standards are aligned with other reputable email sending platform's requirements and help to keep a shared sending network healthy for all that use it. 

In additon to ensuring all contacts have opted into your brand before inclusing them in bulk email sends, we also reccomend use of a list validation service like Kickbox that can help to identify invalid contacts from your database so they can be excluded from sends and high bouce rates can be avoided. 

[HubSisNOTforSME]

Hello,

As been denied the righ to appeal as stipulated in Service Terms, I will continue to make my case here and where else I can. 

You said that this low bounce threshold is in place to protect me and "as well as to protect HubSpot's shared email sending network from damage" fine with this and makes total sense to me but you need to respect your own rules than.

When you suspend the emailing feature you clearly stipulate that by importing an op-out list OR (not and) deleting the stale contacts I will regain access. This was obviously not the case as I imported an opt-out list right away after I cleaned it, so where is the right to appeal the decision of the all-mighty HubSpot robot?

"HubSpot requires that all contacts included in marketing email sends have provided your brand with their email address and verifiable permission to be sent promotional email,  and the opt in requirements will often be more stringernt than local privacy legislation like GDPR." - yes, all these are in place already. Moreover, the list did not get any spam reports! So this is not an clear case of ill intent. Looking back in the sent history, you will observe a stellar open rate, thus once again confirming the positive and fair practice. 

As regards to Kickbox, this would be helpfull to know before locking my account. It would be helpfull to know that HubSpot intollerance to bounces is so bad that the same list of clients I had no problem on MailChimp. 

Knowing this, I would never ever again contact my prospects through the HubSpot emailing feature because you risk to lock it indefinite. If offered the chance to appeal and regain access I would probably use it just to send the company Newsletter.

So I guess this is a piece of custumer advice from me, do not use HubSpot email for anything else but newsletter!!!!  But being denied the right to appeal, ofcourse I can not do this.

Thanks for reading this. To all users out there, maybe this is usefull.

[DeliveryByJess]

Hello @HubSisNOTforSME ,

Appealing an email suspension requires access to HubSpot Support for human help, which is not a feature offered with free accounts within HubSpot.  Marketing Free accounts are not eligable for suspension remeditaion, and this is stated in the knowlege base article around email suspensions:

Free CRM accounts

You'll be notified about the suspension in a banner message in your email tool. After email sending is suspended, the email tool will remain locked.

You can continue to use the other tools in your HubSpot account.