HubSpot CRM vs. Salesforce Sales Cloud

Most of our clients are either government institutions or Education sector clients, such as universities, colleges, Coaching Institutes, and Competitive boards. We store their data in a single place. That means we can keep our one client's data in one place without any confusion. Our data is always clear and understandable while it is in HubSpot CRM.

Incentivized

Salesforce Sales Cloud is great for tracking your dealer (reseller) information, customer information, order information, and generating reports. You would want to use Salesforce as a smaller business because it is easy to use and keeps track of everything. You can also click on the reports tab and quickly generate different reports or save them as an Excel file to share with your team. You can set those reports with desired features and change them to fit your needs. I would say SF is not the best if you are going to send lots of marketing emails, etc, because it is not as visually friendly as HubSpot, for example.

Incentivized

• The ability to create marketing campaigns and have control over when to stop and when to send the next according to your cadence design is excellent. However the ability to see the performance and the history for each prospect is so simple and so accessible - I kicked myself for not getting it sooner.
• Having one place to create companies and contacts as well as score leads and track all contract products means we don't have to miss any renewals.
• The Deal tracker gives us the ability to track multiple pipelines as well as team and individual metrics like average sale, percentage of goal, contribution to team effort which when mixed with an activity tracker means the team stays lean and mean to crush all goals.
• The real time chat feature means prospects can navigate to our landing page for info about us, levels of product availability, pricing and begin a quick chat with members of the sales and support team.
• Intel features along with lead scoring, SEO integration, podcasts and white papers all combine to be the most comprehensive CRM you could need.

Incentivized

• Logging notes: SF makes it easy to log notes in the timeline or static notes that live in an easy-to-see spot for longevity.
• Logging activities: It's easy to post a call, text, email, etc.
• API data: Once connected, SF is critical to automation, such as website activity, login activity, pages visited, etc., which saves the Customer Success side time in understanding account activity.
• Custom fields: you can add custom fields to really personalize your experience. We use quite a few and it's brilliant.

Incentivized

• At times, it feels like there are too many options, which can be overwhelming when trying to grasp all that it has to offer fully.
• The reporting features are lacking. It can be challenging to pull and export reports to share with users who are not on Hubspot.
• It appears to have more issues with Windows; it consistently logs out and requires re-login to the CRM and the HubSpot Outlook add-on.

Incentivized

• I'd like to see a global roll up, but individual customized versions by team
• Consolidate! Agreements are often found under attachments, contracts, confidential information, cases, and a couple of more places
• Statuses: Make the status, owner, and last touch date/time easier to find

Incentivized

To be honest there are some barriers due to which we are unable to use Hubspot at it's full potentials. The region that we work in has some restrictions that don't allow us to make calls or text which leaves us to just Email to the client.

Incentivized

There are days when I wish we hadn't switched, but I know that if we put in the time, we will get to where we want to be with the software and that it has many more capabilities than anything else we looked at. However, the amount of time and onboarding we need to do is also far greater than we realized/were told when we originally bought the product. They told us we should hire onboarding support, but at the end, after we had already reached our budget maximum for this, so it's been slower than we had hoped.

Incentivized

Once you are set up with HubSpot CRM, it becomes difficult to use any other tool, as it integrates you into the workflow and makes it a habit to log in to HubSpot to identify tasks for the day. The overall ease of use is also a brilliant factor in using HubSpot. They push you towards deal closure and revenue generation.

Incentivized

Salesforce has been designed on the basis of "Clicks, not code". So anyone willing to learn the Salesforce user interface (which is quite good as far as management software platforms go) is able to become a Salesforce user or even a Salesforce administrator. You don't have to know coding language to work in the Salesforce environment. Also, Salesforce has one of the best software training resources (Trailhead) that I have ever encountered. It is free to all, easy to use, and most importantly it is interactive. No scrolling through endless text in a user manual. There are hands-on modules and related videos interlaced and through it all you earn points and badges to display your level of learning.

Incentivized

All Force.com apps run on world-class data centers with backup, failover, and disaster-recovery facilities. Force.com has had a proven 99.9 percent uptime record for years. Accordingly, I only recall our instance of Salesforce having one unscheduled, brief down time over 6 years. I can't remember for sure, but it may have been due to our Internet Service Provider (ISP) versus Salesforce itself. Also, Salesforce does it's best to keep customers in the loop:

Trust.salesforce.com is the salesforce.com community's home for real-time information on system performance and security. On this site you'll find:

Live and historical data on system performance
Up-to-the minute information on planned maintenance
Phishing, malicious software and social engineering threats
Best security practices for your organization
Information on how we safeguard your data

For a SaaS provider, I'd rate their performance to be one of the best. At times, reporting tends to slow down if the data set is very large, which is the case in any system. But, that's a very rare phenomenon

Because when I needed help HubSpot responded immediately and provided me with the information I needed which enabled me to realize that HubSpot was even more customizable and easier to use than I thought! And I already thought HubSpot was very user friendly and easy to use, and then Support showed me how to manipulate the settings, columns and the appearance of the tool.

Incentivized

The overall support has been good. More and more features are being released quite frequently. Very small features are also making big difference in how the tool can be adapted and used better. If there is anything we need or are stuck, the support team sets up a call and helps in resolving the issue/provides workarounds.

I attended two training sessions. I would rate them a 4 as an advanced user. It was very basic – great for someone new – would give 8+ for new person.

I had 3 years of experience at the time. I skipped basic and went onto advanced and still not helpful. A lot of it was best practices that didn’t feel relevant for our business

I have gone through multiple. The content that’s delivered is quite basic – I wish they had more advanced training.

We are grandfathered into premium support plus training. We get unlimited access to instructor led and online training for free. We have taken advantage of this

If you've had any prior experience with cloud based marketing automation or group communication tools, you can do the implementation without paid outside support. Though getting to a SLA (service level agreement) would be best achieved with the help of a third party who can facilitate

Incentivized

Just from an organizational standpoint - we standardized our data prior to moving to Salesforce. But we essentially standardized it wrong. That's created a big disgusting mess for us know that I'll have to deal with as the Admin. Be sure you think through use cases prior to doing something like that - seek outside opinions on how the data will work best, especially depending on what else you're going to integrate with Salesforce.

Our team and senior managers deemed these products worth reviewing and requested that every team assess them, enabling our company to make an informed decision about the software to purchase. Everybody checked, and a survey was conducted among all those employees. We received the most votes for HubSpot CRM, as most employees preferred it.

Incentivized

Salesforce sales can do everything Front does regarding email integrations and communicating with your peers. Still, it provides even more insight for our salespeople and leadership team. Although Front is cheaper, we decided the added productivity and visibility provided to the team would be well worth the higher price tag.

Incentivized

Salesforce Sales Cloud is highly scalable and designed to accommodate the needs of businesses of all sizes, from small startups to large enterprises. It offers flexible subscription models and can easily scale up or down based on the organization's requirements. Whether a company is expanding its sales team, increasing its customer base, or adding new features and functionalities, Sales Cloud can adapt to support growth without sacrificing performance or reliability. Additionally, Salesforce's cloud-based architecture ensures that users have access to resources and capabilities as needed, making it a highly scalable solution for organizations looking to automate customer relationship management at scale.

Incentivized

• Gave a ton of visibility into user and sales funnel.
• Able to get back to new signups or inbound leads much faster, sometimes within minutes. We have a Slack integration that's super helpful.
• Saved hours each week that were earlier spent digging through emails or spreadsheets for context; meetings are a lot shorter because it is super easy to go through the created reports.

Incentivized

• The inbox feature allows me to see when the customer opens my email, and hence a timely follow-up could result in a higher response rate.
• The mobile app allows users to gain access to leads and customer contacts on the go, which increases sales team productivity and enhances customer conversations.
• The reports of the notes on the account level are not working, which is causing manual work in the weekly report to leadership.

Incentivized