In this tutorial, Isaac P. walks accounting firm owners through HubSpot’s core features and evaluates when the platform is a good fit. He begins by stating that HubSpot is rarely his top recommendation for small firms (5‑30 people) unless they have multiple marketing channels, a sales team larger than two, and sufficient cash flow, because the free version is attractive but paid tiers can become costly. He then demonstrates four high‑value feature sets for firms that choose HubSpot: (1) Integrated communication and activity timeline that consolidates emails, calls, notes, tasks, meetings, tickets, deals, and document attachments within each contact record; (2) Marketing forms that capture lead information (e.g., revenue, buying role) and can be embedded on websites or manually entered for referral leads, helping firms qualify prospects early; (3) Meetings scheduling, a built‑in Calendly‑like tool offering one‑on‑one, group, and round‑robin booking with automated confirmations and reminders; (4) Deal pipelines that visualize sales stages, allow weighted revenue forecasting, and can be repurposed for onboarding or upsell processes. He also critiques HubSpot’s native proposal/quote feature, recommending the industry‑specific Practice Ignition for accounting proposals, while highlighting HubSpot’s automation and workflow capabilities that can trigger emails, tasks, and integrations across contacts, deals, and external platforms. The video concludes with a brief mention of other CRMs he prefers, a link to a “best CRMs for accounting firms” video, and a call‑to‑action to book a free strategy consultation at opso.co/accounting.
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HubSpot is a great CRM that I rarely recommend to accounting firms. It has a lot of things going for it. Many people are attracted to its free version. I'm gonna walk you through some of my favorite features today, but having helped over 50 clients select their technology, I've rarely recommended it for small firms of, you know, 5 to 20, maybe even 30 people. And here's why. HubSpot, it's great if you do multi-channel marketing, if you have like 3+ digital channels that you market through, if you have a sales team of, you know, more than 2 reps, and if you have excess cash flow to afford it, because it can get expensive quickly. But if you solely have like 1 or 2 marketing channels, if you mostly— 1 person is doing the sales in your firm, which might be you as the owner or a partner— I do find there's better value with other CRMs. If you want to know other CRMs I favor, actually stick to the end because I'll show you. But first, I'll discuss 4 specific set of features that that will help you make the most out of HubSpot if you're already set on it. So join me and I'll walk you through it. Okay, so here we are in HubSpot and we're going to go through what I think is probably one of the most helpful features, which is the integrated communication that you can see for contacts. So within the Contacts tab, we just go and open up the contacts and we open up one of the sample contacts that HubSpot has by default. So you can get a sense of why this is so helpful. So the first thing you can see at the top left is a variety of buttons that you can— that allow you to log or act on certain things for the client. For example, you can add specific notes. If you have your email integrated with it and you have the accounting features connected, you can directly email the client within HubSpot. You can directly call them and have that call recorded and logged onto their contact history. You can create tasks either for you or one of your team members to follow up on, and you can schedule meetings and schedule calls with the client so that you can meet and potentially review specific deliverables. You can also see a variety of properties. These are custom. You can customize them to your needs. So that you can see at a glance about the contact. Here, for an accounting firm, you might be able to want— depending on what you do, right? You might see— you might want to see their address, you might want to see their phone number, you might want to see, depending on what you do, their date of birth, their Social Security number, whatever it is about the contact that you want to make sure you have here at a glance is something you can easily set up. Now, if I go ahead, click, and here click on overview, this is where I should see at a glance when this— when was this person created, what was the last activity, any recent communications I'll be able to see here, and is this contact going through any particular deals at the moment. So are we on talk with this person to potentially close on one of our services? You can also see tickets. For example, they requested help for a specific thing. You should be able to see that if that's part of what you have available within HubSpot. But my favorite part of all of this is the activities where you'll be able to see the entire history of the client. So when was this account created? Okay, a deal was created at this date, at this time. You can see the various notes, and if you put attachment on those notes that will automatically update. So here on this other sidebar, you'll be able to see all of the documents that have been uploaded. This comes in very handy if clients are sending you their last year returns and other documents that you might want to have handy at any given time and that often get lost in the inbox. Again, you can see the emails here that you sent or that you log, and you can also see the activity client has done. So if they've opened the email, if they clicked on the email, etc., etc. This is a fantastic way for you to see all the activity. And if you want to hone down on specific things like notes, like emails on calls, you'd be able to with this tab. Lastly, I walked you through a little bit of this already, but you see the attachments, you'll see any tickets that are open on this right sidebar, and you'll see the deals that are available, which you can always preview to see what they are about, to see anything that you might want to see. Okay, this is the line item, this is monthly bookkeeping, and you can of course always, rather than preview, just click on it to dive in further into that particular deal. So that's just one example of how you can have all your client interactions in in one place. You can easily reference all the previous communication. You can make sure that you and your team are on the same page or where this client is at their stage of the, you know, the journey you're walking them through to help them with your service. Okay, so let's look at another set of features that I think come in very handy for accounting firms, and it's the marketing forms. Despite them being called marketing forms, which I think it's Pretty much because their most common use case is to gather information from a lead and help you qualify that lead. I also believe that it can be helpful for part of your client delivery, but let me walk you through how it works. So I'm going to create a standalone page here for the purposes of this video. I'm going to— well, you can see here a couple of examples: support, download an ebook, register for a particular event, sign up for a newsletter, contact us. I'm just going to start from scratch to show you some of the details here. So you can see the email is there by default because it's often required so you can attach it to a particular contact. And it's not rare for accounting firms to have like a list of email addresses or maybe phone numbers, and that's it without further contacts. Something that I think can come in very handy depending on what you offer is to make sure that you have— you specify here what could potentially prevent you from working with a client. For example, you can have their company name, but potentially, if we look here further, you can have their annual revenue because maybe if they're below a particular specific revenue, you don't work with them for one reason or another. I should also mention that if you have website traffic, these forms you can actually embed on your website so that leads fill these out by themselves. But if your leads are coming from referrals, which is common for many accounting firms, or you know you're getting business from your network, what you can do is actually fill this out and make sure we remember to ask some of these questions when you're talking with people that you might want to engage with. And then you fill this out yourself, and that way this actually populates on your CRM directly. So the whole goal is really to capture leads with all the context you need to determine whether you'll be a fit or not. You don't want to waste your time later following up with people that aren't a fit at all. So just try to think about, okay, what are those, you know, 3 to 5 criteria that we need to make sure that this engagement and talking to this person will be the right thing? Yeah, you can have other things here, as you can see, like social media information. I don't think that will be asked for, depending on what your market is, but these are some of the things that you can definitely definitely consider. Buying role is a big one. So if you're working with big companies, you want to make sure that you're talking to the decision maker. And if you're talking to someone else, then that will inform how you're going to follow up with this person. And you could potentially have automations in place that depending on who they are, depending on the revenue, depending on their size, will have different actions on the back end. So that's forms for you. I hope that's it. Moving on to the 3rd feature, which is very, very handy, which is the meetings. This is the scheduling. If you are familiar at all with Calendly or solutions like it, this is essentially a similar set of features built into HubSpot. First, it looks helpful. Create a scheduling page. You'll see that I have multiple options. So either I can do one-on-one, which is probably the most popular one, like you have one person that wants to meet with the other. You can also arrange a group meeting. So if you want to meet with multiple people and you want to make sure that the options available, the slots shown are only the match of multiple people. So is that it's like John and Susie are both available at this time. That's the only time that will be shown. And also round robin. This is very helpful for sales teams where you might want to have a main prospect scheduling page so that all your leads and prospects come through it, but then you want to assign it, rotating it through multiple people. Might be, for example, if it's just the part— if it's 2 partners running the business and they're both making sales, it could be rotating them, or it could be potentially a sales team per se. Okay, so let's go through this meeting that I have here already, uh, set up, and then we'll be able to see the different tabs we have to set up a meeting within HubSpot. So you have Overview, you have Scheduling, and you have Automation. So on the Overview page, we'll be able to see the type of meeting. This is a one-on-one meeting. Who's the organizer? You can have a specific title. So for example, you might say this is your tax discovery session. Location, you can add actually a video conference link if you are already using something like Zoom or Microsoft Teams to have these calls, and you can allow for cancellation and rescheduling automatically if you want, is an option. So the scheduling page, this is just going to give you an overview how that page is going to look like so that you can see an example of how people would go ahead and click, select if they want 15, 30 minutes, or an hour. In this case, you can change those direction options. If, for example, you only want 30 minutes, you would do something like this. That would be the only option for them. And you can add in your availability so that people will be able to select only those time frames that way when you are able to have those calls. In the automation front, this is typically sending in an email confirmation, sending them reminders multiple reminders, probably as the date gets closer so that they know, you know. So as you can see here, I can add reminders. You can add multiple, and you— well, up to 3 it looks like. So you can say, hey, 3 hours, 1 day before, 12 hours, maybe 6 hours before, and 15 minutes before the meeting, I want that person to see see a reminder email so that they can remember to join in. And you can see even a preview here of that, of how that would look like. So that's an example of the meetings feature. I hope that helps, and let's move on to the next feature. So here's the pipeline, or in this case they call it deals feature within HubSpot. It's pretty much you're able to see a set of columns that represent stage in your sales process. It doesn't necessarily have to only be, for example, this pipeline. It's a typical one where you schedule an appointment, you qualify the person, you present some sort of presentation, you get the buy-in, you send a contract, and you win or lose the deal. You could also have pipelines maybe for existing clients. How do you go about selling an existing client on an extra service, sort of like an upsell or a cross-sell or even downsell depending on the prices there. Or you could— sometimes I've seen people have pipelines that represent a particular process. For example, onboarding. You may have an onboarding pipeline where you are guiding people through, okay, after they made the sale, how did you go about moving them forward? It's technically more designed for sales, so either front-end sales or back-end sales for upsells, stuff and things like that, but can also be used for other things. So one of the things I like is that you'll be able to see— you can attach a weight and you'll be able to see at any given time how much revenue, weighted revenue, you have on any stage at any given time. This really allows you, once you have this built and up and running, it allows you to forecast to an extent how much revenue might come in in the future, and that can help you plan so that you can, you know, plan your capacity accordingly, give a heads up to your team that there's some overtime coming, or potentially hire new people if that's something you need. And yeah, and this is how you can start understanding what to focus on as the owner of the business or as a manager of the sales process. Not to mention that what gets measured gets improved, so that you can start refining your sales process and Seeing how we can improve the show rates, how we can improve the close rates of the business so that we can close more deals and get more clients on board. Okay, so last but not least, I was going to discuss proposals. They have what it's called, or they call here quotes. Unfortunately, I'm not a big fan of their proposal features, and if you're an accounting firm, I would definitely recommend Practice Ignition instead. Which is the standard in that particular industry. But one of my favorite features, and it is favorite for us because this is what we do, it's the automation and workflow features. This is where you can truly save a bunch of time by automating as much things as you want. And the good thing is that it essentially, since it's just the same platform, it seamlessly integrates with everything else here. So contacts, marketing, sales, for example. You can send automatic emails when the person books an appointment. You create tasks automatically when you have to, when people book an appointment so that you can maybe follow up or call the contact personally within the sales automation, within the deals. For example, you can make it so that when you move this to contract send, that, that it's created on another platform automatically, or the other way around, that when you send the proposal in Ignition, for example, that these moves automatically. You don't even have to remember. Onboarding, again, if you were to use a pipeline for that, you can send client reminders to upload certain documents. You can create tasks to follow up on that, make sure that doesn't fall through the cracks. For delivery, also you can send client updates as tasks get completed. So if you build a little bit of a project management thing here on HubSpot, which I wouldn't recommend for, but if you were to do that, You can make it so that you can assign it to team members, and when they check that off, clients get updated automatically. And you could also, with the forms, you could potentially solicit feedback once projects are done. You can encourage clients to review your firm publicly if you have something like a Google profile or on any other review platform, or potentially even refer you to other people if they were satisfied with the service. So That's my overview on HubSpot. If you're looking for CRMs for your business, check out my recent video on the best CRMs for accounting firms because HubSpot is just one of them and it's actually not my first recommendation. And if you want to talk to a strategist to help you select the best CRM for your needs, head on to opso.co/accounting to book a free consultation or check out the first link in the description below. Thanks for your time and I'll see you in the next one.
