Everyone has heard of Hubspot! It’s one of the most popular CRMs in the world. When you start off, it’s cheap, but typically as you scale, your costs skyrocket to thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.
Before beginning to negotiate a discount with Hubspot, you must understand what levers you can pull to maximize the ROI on your time spent.
To help with this, we've analyzed hundreds of Hubspot contracts and millions of dollars of spending to help you understand what levers you can pull in the following scenarios:
Managing a Hubspot renewal when your contract value is increasing:
When your contract increases, you will get offered a discount by default in most circumstances. What’s important when you negotiate Hubspot, are the levers you can pull:
- New products: The more Hubspot products you use, the higher the discount potential. Use this knowledge to your advantage. You don't need to disclose right away that you're looking to purchase Service Hub and Sales Hub.
- Billing frequency: You will get offered a higher discount if you pay upfront. You can however get the annual discount and then negotiate to pay quarterly on monthly. This means you get the best of both.
- Time: Conversations need to kick off 90 days in advance. The closer to your renewal date, the less leverage you have.
- Competition: Do you know what terms competitive tools like Salesforce are offering? From Hubspot’s perspective, there’s a risk you will churn. Use Hudled's CRM pricing insights on Salesforce and other tools to increase your leverage on price.
- Benchmark price: Find out what companies like you are paying and what the best terms that are offered are. If you can reference what other companies are paying, it will help your chances of getting a higher discount.
Managing a Hubspot renewal when your contract value is staying the same:
If you are happy with your discount, you don’t need to negotiate. You can let your contract auto-renew, and you don’t need to invest time. When you negotiate Hubspot, the levers you can pull are:
- Billing frequency: It's unlikely you can negotiate the best possible terms and discounts without changes in your contract. There may be an opportunity for you to get a bigger discount if you pay annually. This however is unlikely.
- Competition: Research what other CRMs like Salesforce cost. If you're a start-up, find out what the most popular start-up sales SaaS stack and CRM.
- Time: If you are trying to negotiate, 30 days should be sufficient for a productive conversation.
Managing a Hubspot renewal when your contract value is decreasing:
Negotiating a discount on Hubspot when your contract is decreasing has a low probability of success. You don’t have leverage, and from Hubspot's perspective, it will be hard for their account managers to get approval for any material discounts. Worst case scenario is that you keep your current discount. The ability to drive material savings lessens, but there are still some levers you can pull:
- Pity: Yep! this is a strategy. A compelling story about why you need to reduce costs can help you get a better price.
- Temporary discount: You can negotiate a temporary discount e.g. 60% off for six months until you close your next round of investment. This is normally approved on a case-by-case basis.
- Case study: Be involved in a co-marketing activity. This may help you get an additional 2-5% discount.
- Competition: Find out what other CRMs charge. It's not ideal to migrate, but you can use Hudled's CRM pricing insights as a reference point.
- Time: If you are trying to negotiate, 30 days should be sufficient to have a productive conversation.
Negotiate a discount on Hubspot when purchasing for the first time:
You will be able to negotiate a discount with Hubspot when you purchase for the first time. Many factors will impact the terms, and having access to Hubspot pricing insights will help. The levers you can pull are:
- Request for proposal (RFP): Vendor will take you more seriously and typically offer higher discounts when they have to tender for your business. Note that this strategy is more effective for larger companies.
- Billing frequency: Find out what companies like you are paying and what the best terms that are offered are.
- Time: Start speaking to Hubspot at the end of the financial year. If that's not possible, the end of the quarter or month will increase your chances of a higher discount.
- Urgency: Use time to your advantage. See if there's an opportunity to improve the deal terms if you close faster.
- Competition: Do you know what the most popular SaaS stack for a scale-up sales team is? Use data to your advantage. Know how popular Salesforce, Close, Pipedrive and other CRMs are.
It’s essential to remember that cost is just one factor any business needs to consider when purchasing or renewing SaaS tools like Hubspot.
Would you like more pricing insights?
At Hudled, we’re building a SaaS intelligence platform to manage the full lifecycle of your SaaS stack. Our data-driven approach enables you to leverage data to buy the right tools at the best price. To ensure you're paying the best price across your entire SaaS stack, get started for free and request a SaaS audit.
Please note the author generated this text in part with GPT-3, OpenAI’s large-scale language-generation model. Upon generating draft language, the author reviewed, edited, and revised the language of this publication
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