Sales reps spend their days sending emails, making calls, leaving voicemails, and connecting on social media.
HubSpot, powered by their free CRM, is one of the most popular sales solutions in the world. In fact, HubSpot ranks in the top 10 CRMs based on market share, against some heavy enterprise competition.
Most of the tasks that a sales rep undertakes can be performed easily through HubSpot’s sales solution. But certain apps offer advanced phone integration solutions with their system. For sales teams, there are few excellent apps in the HubSpot marketplace that can extend the functionality of HubSpot’s built-in phone features.
These integrated phone apps add calling functionality to HubSpot — often allowing for placing calls directly in the HubSpot app, recording calls, leaving voicemail drops, and other phone-focused features for sales teams. These phone features are also a popular option for customer service teams as well, as they deliver an additional channel to get into contact with leads and prospects.
Without a HubSpot phone integration, your sales and support teams would have to utilize a third-party system. That creates a few issues.
First, your conversations with prospects would have to be manually logged into your HubSpot contact records, which is cumbersome and requires diligence on the part of your sales team. You’ll have to rely on them to properly log data. And some won’t. Especially if the process is tedious. This means that they will lack context in future sales conversations with prospects.
With a phone integration for HubSpot in place, most HubSpot phone system apps will automatically log interactions for you on your contact records. With sales phone systems, calls are typically recorded. Then, your peers can listen to each call in systems where the call itself is recorded, to learn and improve their selling skills and techniques
Without an integrated app, sales teams would have to log in to a completely different system, referenced by the manual addition to the contact log. Then they’d have to search through the system to find the call in question to listen to it. If it wasn’t logged correctly, it may never get checked at all. Having your calling system disconnected from HubSpot creates more work for your entire team.
Tracking calls and integrating them into HubSpot enables you to improve lead scoring efforts, nurturing, and campaigns.
Additionally, these tracking features are ideal for reporting on progress. How many calls the sales team did this month? Same for support. Enjoy a top-down view of how your company is engaging with our customers.
In the end, this will lead to fewer calls being placed, fewer interactions with customers, and less effective management of your sales operations.
HubSpot includes a built-in phone integration that makes it convenient to make calls directly from HubSpot with just a click of a button, and analyze your logged calls for improvement
But sometimes you’ll require additional functionality or support for phone features, particularly in companies that rely heavily on phone outreach to customers.
Luckily, there are many great options for phone integrations available in the HubSpot App Marketplace. In this article, we’ll break down some of the best HubSpot phone apps and cover the most critical features delivered by each.
Aircall is a popular cloud-based phone system that focuses on simplicity to strip attention away from other mundane sales tasks and instead place the focus on engaging with your customers and prospects. Using Aircall, you can eliminate much of the manual data entry that is required in typical sales call logging.
They have apps available for both iOS and Android, as well as browser-based solutions for on-the-go sales operations. Their HubSpot app delivers a fully functional integration that is easy-to-use and intuitive inside of HubSpot.
Another huge plus is that the Aircall in-HubSpot app looks pretty slick:
Source: Aircall
Aircall keeps track of full previous interactions and automatically logs call notes, tags, and calls, reducing the amount of time that sales teams have to spend entering data. Further, Aircall also automatically detects where it needs to log that information — whether with HubSpot contacts, deals, or companies. And, based on reviews, it is quite accurate.
Then, those recorded calls and information can be used at a later time for training your team how to engage with HubSpot contacts.
Aircall also features a power-dialer, increasing hourly call abilities by hundreds of dials per hour for sales reps. In the Aircall power-dialer, you can upload a CSV with contact information (or a list of phone numbers), and the power-dialer will automatically work its way through them, passing off answered calls to your reps.
With Aircall, there is no need to switch back and forth between platforms. You can work exclusively out of HubSpot, making use of the full Aircall feature set. Everything including one-click calling, managing HubSpot contacts, populating phone numbers, and logging information with no need to continue switching back and forth.
With Aircall’s tagging, HubSpot workflows can be automatically triggered from Aircall actions. Aircall actions can both be triggered or do the triggering within the workflow themselves, allowing Aircall actions to fit seamlessly into your sales and customer support processes.
Aircall goes a bit further than other HubSpot phone apps in a few key areas. First, the post-call processes are completely automatable. Aircall’s tags can trigger workflow actions, then all actions can be tied together in the service hub, with Aircall automatically creating tickets and logging call activity on those tickets.
If you are looking for a fully-featured phone integration app that can be used to its full potential from your HubSpot dashboard — you’d be hard-pressed to find a better solution than Aircall.
Quotes From AirCall’s HubSpot App Marketplace Reviews:
“Aircall works great. Outages are rare and Aircall is always aware of the problem before we are. Issues are resolved promptly.”
“Easy application. Makes keeping in touch with contacts seamless. Only issues is that the call quality tends to drop at some point”
Installs: 3,500 installs
Pricing: Aircall is available from $30 a month for an essential plan to $50 for enterprise, billed annually.
CallRail is a call tracking, text messaging, and analytics solution that syncs directly with your HubSpot records. CallRail activities will be displayed directly alongside other lead activities within contact records.
The HubSpot and CallRail integration also opens up several options for automation.
CallRail calls, text messages, and other activities can be used to bolster, create, or trigger automated workflows within HubSpot. For instance — a customer answering a call from your sales team could trigger an automated sequence of emails in HubSpot. Conversely, a contact opening and engaging with your email could trigger an automated text message, assigning contacts, or even queue up a call for your sales representatives.
With creativity and HubSpot workflows, the possibilities are endless.
CallRail integrates seamlessly with HubSpot. You can even listen to the calls themselves directly in each contact record, making it easy to check into activity and evaluate your sales messaging and approaches to different types of situations. This is ideal for training new members of your team and working with veteran members to improve.
Source: CallRail on HubSpot App Marketplace
Because CallRail allows you to sync data between their platform and HubSpot, marketing and sales teams can track engagements with customers both online and offline to better evaluate their approach and identify areas for improvement.
CallRail’s deep analytics give you a bird’s-eye-view into your marketing, sales, and support efforts. Using their system, you can setup complete call workflows that walk your reps through the process of engaging with customers step-by-step.
All of CallRail’s features are also available through their mobile app.
HubSpot isn’t the only solution that CallRail integrates with, either. There are a whole host of different tools and integrations that you can connect to CallRail — some of which will also integrate with HubSpot through the app ecosystem. With the right HubSpot integration stack, you could potentially ensure that you have all of your major systems connected and sharing data between one another.
Quotes From CallRail’s HubSpot App Marketplace Reviews:
“They have very good documentation to refer to as well as personnel to help you get this done quickly and efficiently. They stay in touch with you after your initial set-up to make sure you are not having any problems also.”
“It's given an incredible amount of insight into the customers that are actually reaching out to the business and the quality of the customer. In the past, I've used other call-tracking providers and CallRail is the easiest to implement/set-up.”
Installs: 1,500+ installs
Pricing: Pricing for Callrail starts at $45 per month for their smallest plan, and goes up to $145 per month for the largest, making it incredibly affordable for businesses of all sizes.
Kixie Powercall is an AI-based auto-dialer solution that integrates with HubSpot and operates as a Google Chrome browser extension. For that reason, Kixie Powercall can be installed within seconds.
Designed primarily as a sales engagement solution, Kixie delivers an engagement platform that boasts its reliability, with automated calling and texting features that integrate seamlessly with a wide range of systems. Kixie Powercall also offers features that allow it to be used as an on-premises system.
Kixie takes things a step farther than other HubSpot phone integration systems, offering a full enterprise solution — complete with ring groups, voicemails, virtual receptionists, and call transfers.
Kixie also offers a caller ID system so that you can identify who an incoming call is coming from, connecting directly to your HubSpot CRM and identifying leads by name so your teams will always know which prospects they are connecting with, based on data in your HubSpot CRM.
With their automated calling and voicemail drops, sales teams are able to effortlessly touch base with prospects in an automated way.
Source: HubSpot App Marketplace
Kixie also offers real-time call coaching for sales teams, allowing sales managers to “whisper” into calls and provide instructions to sales reps that can not be heard by customers and prospects on the call. This is an ideal way to train new sales reps and practice new approaches, led by more experienced salespeople.
When integrated with HubSpot, Kixie allows for lifetime call recordings that never disappear from contact records and can be listened to directly in the contact record screen. Included in those interactions are whispers and responses from coaches so that the coaching can also be evaluated at a later date.
Source: HubSpot App Marketplace
Kixie Powercall can also be used in HubSpot workflows, both reacting to triggers and as its step in the workflow, as well as acting as a trigger, allowing for other automated actions to happen based on actions in Kixie.
Kixie is a powerful HubSpot phone integration, perfect for small businesses and enterprise companies alike.
Quotes From Kixie Powercall’s HubSpot App Marketplace Reviews:
“Kixie has been a game changer for helping us with outbound efforts. One click and you're dialing. One click and you can leave a VM. One click for templated SMS. The dial pad is super simple to use and the integration to HubSpot is amazing.”
“Kixie allows me to hit my daily outbound metrics with ease. It populates call notes, schedules follow-ups and allows me to text prospects all from the same tab. I love that it enables me to deliver and record SMS from my "work" phone - it drives stellar response rates in doing so.”
Installs: 500+
Kixie Powercall Pricing: Kixie’s pricing ranges from $29 for to $55 a month for the annual plan ($35 to $65 for a monthly plan), making it a super affordable solution for companies of any size.
So, which one of these HubSpot phone integrations is right for you?
Well, it depends. There is certainly some feature overlap between them. And all three of these solutions are high-quality, with many reviews on the HubSpot app marketplace.
With that said — you can’t really go wrong in choosing one of these HubSpot phone integration tools.
For budget conscious companies, AirCall and Kixie may be the better choices. All three plans are billed per-user, but CallRail requires that you subscribe to their “Call Tracking” before you can subscribe to the other features, which can cause the costs to mount.
Kixie also offers a free trial, which makes it an attractive option for companies that would like to give a solution a test run before making a larger investment.
Aircall may be the right choice for companies that are concerned about call quality. Aircall boasts a market leading enterprise infrastructure that allows them to deliver higher quality calls than the competition, with 99.99% uptime.
For companies that want to take a more data-focused approach to storing and analyzing their call data, the right choice in CallRail. Their system uses A.I. to transcribe and smartly categorize your calls. This provides you with deeper analytics and more insights, without having to hire expensive consultants.
When you rely on HubSpot phone integrations for your sales and customer service teams, you are also relying on accurate data. You need accurate, error-free phone numbers in your database to ensure that you are able to connect with your target leads, customers, and companies. But, the phone number field can be home to many common data issues.
Inaccurate phone numbers are commonplace whenever a person is responsible for manually entering the information into the system. The average benchmark for data entry error rate is 1%.
Some customers use Insycle for the phone formatting, because those apps require specific phone number format, and without proper formatting you cannot use the click-to-dial feature.
Apps may also create contact records based on phone numbers. In those circumstances, they may create duplicate contacts due to different phone number formatting. For example, if a sales rep calls “212-123-4567,” a duplicate contact could be created because HubSpot tries to match it with “+12121234567.” When it can’t find a match, a duplicate is created.
Now consider that there are dozens of different ways that phone numbers could be formatted:
Ideally, you’ll want to use the E. 164 standard in most situations. This is an internationally recognized format that will work with nearly any software, ensuring that your system can recognize international country codes, area codes, and the phone numbers themselves.
The E. 164 phone number format uses this template:
[+][country code][area code][local phone number]
So a phone number that uses the E.164 phone number format might look something like this:
+14151231234
E. 164 uses no spaces, no dashes, no parenthesis, and no periods.
|
Country |
Local Phone Number |
E. 164 Format |
|
USA |
415 123 1234 |
+14151231234 |
|
UK |
020 1234 1234 |
+442012341234 |
|
Lithuania |
8 601 12345 |
+37060112345 |
And those data entry concerns go for both customers and people within your organization that enter data into HubSpot and other systems that HubSpot pulls data from. It can be difficult to add validation to phone number fields, because there are so many ways that people commonly format phone numbers.
Manual data entry leads to a lot of inaccurate phone numbers, which means that a certain percentage of leads and prospects will not be able to be reached through your HubSpot power-dialing system.
Even with automatically added and imported phone data, errors are inevitable. It may not be in the right format, and your software may need a specific format to work with HubSpot. You’ll have records that have phone numbers like 0000000 or other repeating digits, or not enough digits, especially when customers are allowed to fill out their own forms.
If you want all of your integrations to work as they should and to reach the maximum number of prospects and customers, you’ll need to find a way to clean and format your phone number data.
Luckily, Insycle is perfect for that. Insycle is a customer data management and cleansing app that is available in the HubSpot App Marketplace, helping companies to clean, standardize, and format their data in bulk, and on an ongoing basis.
Insycle allows you to fix a wide range of issues with your phone number data field — including formatting issues, non-digit inclusions, spaces, and special characters being added to the field that can gum up your HubSpot phone integrations.
Insycle makes it easy to format phone numbers, with an array of out-of-the-box formatting options, including the international E.164 Standard.
Because Insycle connects directly to HubSpot, you can quickly reformat phone numbers for all of the contacts and companies in your database. Then, using Insycle’s automation and HubSpot workflow features, you can ensure that all new phone numbers are automatically formatted (and cleaned) as they hit your database. You’ll never have to worry about bad phone number data in HubSpot again.
Insycle makes it easy to fix, clean, and standardize phone numbers across all HubSpot record types. Then, you can be certain that you are maximizing your reach through your HubSpot phone integrations.
Insycle is the ideal solution for identifying issues in phone numbers and fixing them, along with formatting phone numbers for contacts and companies in your HubSpot account, and merge duplicate contacts with the same phone number, irrespective of its formatting — space, dash, parenthesis — in bulk and automatically. Using Insycle, you can use apps like CallRail, Kixie Powercall, and Aircall more effectively and reach a larger portion of your prospects and customers.
But Insycle is much more than just a tool for phone numbers.
Data maintenance is critical for every department in your company that touches the data.
Marketing campaigns are only as good as the customer data that drives them. Customer data allows those marketers to segment their lists and personalize their marketing communications in a way that will resonate with the audience.
For sales teams, unmaintained databases means that they do not have reliable data. Your sales teams can’t trust that the information that they have access to is accurate. This impacts their ability to sell. Over time, they lose faith in the data and may begin to conduct their own research outside of your CRM, leaving critical information out of the company’s understanding.
Like marketing and sales teams, your customer support teams also rely heavily on accurate and usable CRM data. Same with customer success, finance, and legal — they all need to access reliable customer data at one time or another.
Insycle is a complete modern customer data management solution. Insycle’s Customer Data Health Assessment is able to analyze your database and find more than 30 common data errors in all of your HubSpot fields and across all of the major record types.
The types of errors that Insycle is able to find and help you clean include things like duplicate records, formatting issues, missing data, and invalid data.
Then, using Insycle, you can set those cleansing and formatting operations to run automatically, on a consistent basis. That way, you can always ensure that you are able to keep data clean on a regular basis, without having to go through the complicated exporting, fixing in Excel, and importing process.
Want to improve your sales operations and make the most of your HubSpot phone integration apps? Learn more about how to automate HubSpot data maintenance to improve the results of your sales and marketing efforts and save you time.