Two Ways to Answer “Are We Getting Our Money’s Worth Out of HubSpot?”

One of the top questions I get asked at FranDev Lab is something like “We’ve had HubSpot for 2 months/2 years/$20k per month. Are we getting our money’s worth?”

It’s a fair question, and I get it. It can be a big contract and it can be hard to see all (any?) of the value you’re getting. I see teams paying for features they never touch. I see teams paying for the wrong things, and others going without things they should be using.

Almost everyone should have the Transactional Emails add-on and almost no one does.

The same question applies to your gym membership, your insurance policy, your cable bill, and last night’s dinner order. “Am I getting my money’s worth” is a question about you and how you use the thing, as much as it’s a question about the thing itself. We want to get value out of our purchases. Its not just a HubSpot thing.

When a leader asks me this, I give one of two answers. Which one depends on how ready they are for tough love.

The Question(s) Behind the Question

“Are we getting our money’s worth” rarely shows up in those exact words. It wears disguises:

• “We’re only using 20% of HubSpot.”
• “We’re paying X, is it worth it?”
• “Can we cut [other tool] and just use HubSpot for that?”
• “Why can’t our HubSpot just do [the thing]?”

Every one of those is the same umbrella question standing in for a pile of underlying concerns. What’s actually bothering the person asking is often unstated, unnamed, or maybe unrelated to HubSpot. Sometimes its just baseline unease or something feeling off about their operations that leads to concern about the number on the renewal invoice.

Answering the literal question with “yes” or “no, you’re not” can be helpful but it rarely addresses the actual concerns and solves no problems. There are two better ways to answer the question.

The first is easy and simple. Its a good goal. The second is harder to hear, and it’s the one that can actually drive change in a company.

Answer #1: “Let’s Get [Your License Fee] in Value out of HubSpot”

The easy frame is so common that this language lives in my template files: we need to get you to the point where you’re pulling at least [your annual license fee] in value out of HubSpot.

This is how I think about every tool I pay for. I want to feel great about the money I spend. Whatever the number is, it should feel like a deal. So when a leader asks if HubSpot is worth it, we start with the math:

• What are you actually paying, and for which Hubs and tiers?
• Which features are you using, and which ones are you paying for and ignoring?
• Are you paying for something in HubSpot that you’re also paying another tool to do or vice versa?
• Are there any utilization features you’re not managing? Marketing Contacts is usually the first culprit. I see teams paying to keep thousands of Contacts marketable that they never email. Seats and Credits can fall into this bucket too.

This is a healthy exercise and a fair goal on its own. You should get real value out of your tools, and you should be able to point to it. I’ve never run this exercise without finding something to trim or something badly under-used.

Its a good place to start but its not really an answer.

Answer #2: What Did You Expect Out of HubSpot?

If someone’s ready for tough love, I hit them with the question underneath the question: what are you actually expecting HubSpot to do for you?

Every company that buys HubSpot has expectations. Pains they want to solve. Things they want to do but can’t. Systems they want to unify. There’s a long list. They buy HubSpot to resolve those expectations.

The biggest gap is whether they bought HubSpot with a plan to tackle those expectations or they bought it with the unstated expectation that HubSpot would magically solve their problems.

Paying for HubSpot is not like paying for a roof repair.

When I pay a roofer, which I do regularly because I live in Tennessee, we both expect the same outcome: no more leaks after that thunderstorm stripped a bunch of shingles off my roof. He and his team do great work and I’m happy to pay him for it.

Buying HubSpot is like buying your own ladder, tools, and materials. If you’ve got the knowledge and you do the work, you can fix the roof. But if you buy all that gear and leave it in the garage, that leak isn’t going to fix itself. You’re out the money and you still have the leak. Haul the tools up to the roof and never actually do the work, and it’s worse: you’ve lost the money, risked the tools, and you still have that leak.

Then you ask “Am I getting my money’s worth out of these tools?”

No, you’ve obviously not.

Franchises need marketing automation, pipeline management, attribution, reporting, forecasting, AI agents, etc. HubSpot can do all those things (and really really well) but don’t confuse buying the tools with doing the job.

That leads to:

• Automations that no one understands because building workflows was assigned to whoever happened to be standing around.
• Integrations that “don’t work” because they were connected by someone who never integrated complex systems and your data models were a mess.
• Broken processes because no one defined the processes before trying to set them up in HubSpot.
• Bad and inaccurate data because no one sat down and mapped what you need, where it comes from, and how it gets used.
• Reports no one trusts because every keeps “their” data in spreadsheets and no one ever asked what reporting all the teams and leaders need.

None of those is HubSpot failing to deliver. Each one is an expectation that was never matched with the work required to fulfill it.

You Can’t Stop at Answer #1

Here’s what you may not want to hear: if you want get at least your license fee in value out of HubSpot every year, you have to address your expectations. You bought tools and you need to team and a plan to put them to work and get the outcome you’re looking for.