5 reasons why you should choose Salesforce over Hubspot as your next CRM
7 min
Choosing a CRM for your business is no easy task, god forbid migrating to a new one. Today I’ll try to shed some light on why we decided to move off Hubspot and into Salesforce, and hopefully provide some valuable insights that might help you make the right decision for your business.
After launching our B2B SaaS startup in 2016, it quickly became obvious that we needed a single system of record to easily manage and track our leads, contacts, pipeline, cases and more.
After doing some extensive research, we shortlisted 3 vendors based on pricing and feature needs. Our main requirement was having a CRM with built in sales engagement features like sales sequences, email tracking and phone calling to make our sales team more productive. We ended up with the following vendors:
1. Hubspot
2. Pipedrive
3. Close
After some debating, we finally decided to go with Hubspot due to the tight integration it had between their sales and marketing automation platform, and also their price. At the time it felt like the right decision, and it probably was, given we were a bootstrapped company with a tight budget and it made no sense to overspend on software tools.
But as we grew we realized the importance of choosing the right CRM, not the most affordable one. Many of us startup founders and tech enthusiasts tend to gravitate towards the cleanest and best looking UI, but a CRM is so much more than that.
When deployed correctly, it becomes the lifeblood of your business as you try to automate processes to efficiently scale up and rely more on reporting to track results across your entire organization.
Salesforce might be very intimidating to young companies. Their high per seat price, paired with upfront annual billing and a complex setup that requires costly professional services and the integration of multiple products will probably make any founder question if it’s the right decision.
Today I’ll share 5 reasons why I believe Salesforce is the best CRM for rapidly growing companies, and why you should consider it over Hubspot.
1. Extensibility and adaptability
One of the key differentiators between a CRM system built for SMBs and one built for high growth companies, is the ability it provides to mold the software to the needs of the business. CRM’s like Hubspot, Close, etc., are great for small businesses because their processes are usually very simple and a CRM that provides capabilities to manage leads, contacts, accounts, opportunities and cases with pre-built configurations, will probably be enough to handle day to day business.
As your company scales, processes will become more complex and you’ll need a system that can automate them.
In the past, companies would migrate into CRM’s like SAP, NetSuite or Oracle as they grew. These systems provide powerful configuration capabilities but would require insurmountable amounts of money to set up and deploy.
Salesforce changed the playing field with their open platform, allowing technical or non technical people to quickly customize their CRM using tools like custom objects, custom fields, process builder, workflows and more.
Pair these tools with more advanced functionality like Lightning App Builder, Lightning Components and APEX and SOQL, and you can quickly build a system that automates your entire business.
Their platform is second to none, with vastly documented APIs, world-class training resources and even the Lightning design system, it is clear that Salesforce understands the importance of CRM extensibility and adaptability.
Their platform is second to none, with vastly documented APIs, world-class training resources and even the Lightning design system, it is clear that Salesforce understands the importance of CRM extensibility and adaptability.
2. Complete suite of products
Another great advantage of using Salesforce is the sheer breadth and depth of their product catalog. Although there is a line of thought that states that businesses should use best in class applications to solve their different needs instead of relying on one integrated vendor, it’s true that connecting these applications together is not for the faint of heart.
- One very common tech stack used by B2B companies includes:
- Salesforce Sales Cloud for CRM
- Outreach for Sales Engagement
- Marketo for Marketing Automation
- Zendesk for Customer Support
Connecting all these systems together to have a 360 view of the customer requires a highly skilled operations team, when in reality using Salesforce products might make things much easier and more efficient.
- In contrast, I’d suggest trying this stack:
- Salesforce Sales Cloud for CRM
- High Velocity Sales for Sales Engagement
- Pardot for Marketing Automation
- Service Cloud for Customer Support
Then Companies can enhance capabilities within these systems using AppExchange partner solutions, but using Salesforce at its core. With this stack the customer will be represented as a single record that lives within Salesforce, instead of having 4 different records that need to be matched across separate systems.
3. Partner ecosystem
If you are not familiar with the story, Marc Benioff the CEO and founder of Salesforce gave the Appstore.com domain as a gift to Steve Jobs. Marc thought of this idea back in 2003, when he had a eureka moment over dinner in San Francisco. The idea was simple: allow any developer to create apps for the Salesforce platform.
With this in mind they created the Salesforce AppExchange, a digital store that provides instant access to over 4,000 business applications, consultants and tools to enhance your Salesforce deployment.
This story provides an insight into how early Salesforce realized the importance of building a partner ecosystem that would enhance the capabilities of their CRM exponentially. Now, Salesforce wouldn’t need to build every feature and product, but rather provide the tools to help others bring these solutions to market while creating a thriving industry that benefited both partners and Salesforce itself.
Why is this relevant to you or your business? Well, you probably use a bunch of SaaS applications to run your business, and most SaaS companies build their best and most complete integrations with Salesforce since it’s the CRM that drives the most sales.
Basically EVERY serious SaaS application integrates with Salesforce.
If you choose a smaller company as your CRM provider, you’ll probably start noticing that the SaaS apps you use on a daily basis, either don’t integrate with that vendor or provide a more lightweight version of the integration, god forbid a Zapier based integration.
4. Reporting capabilities
Salesforce reporting and dashboards are hands down the best in the industry. Salesforce has realised that this is probably the top selling feature for key decision makers and stakeholders and they invested on this heavily.
As you grow your business, you will need to quickly check KPIs across your entire organisation to track the performance of your different teams. These dashboards will need to be highly customizable since every business has a different set of metrics they need to track. Once again, a one size fits all approach will not solve your business needs.
With simpler CRMs you’ll get some commonly used set metrics and dashboards, which is OK in the beginning, but not at a later stage when you need data to run your business.
A good example of this is a key metric we track internally in sales called “Pipeline coverage”. We track this metric by team, rep and across the different quarters to understand if a rep has a enough ratio of pipeline to quota in order to hit their number confidently. If their ratio is 1:1 they’ll most likely miss. In contrast, if their ratio is 5:1 then there is a solid chance they’ll hit their goal. We were able to quickly create this report in a day with the flexibility provided by the Salesforce platform.
5. Popularity & familiarity
Something we underestimate is the importance of great training. This should obviously be done at a product or service level, so new team members quickly understand what they are selling or servicing. But training on software tools should also be done so new reps can be efficient and accurate documenting every customer interaction.
Since most companies run on Salesforce, when you decide to scale your sales team, it’s very likely that the people you hire are already trained on Salesforce.
You’ll make it much easier on yourself and your team if you go with the tried and true solution that everyone knows and loves rather than selecting a more affordable CRM. In the long run when you rack up training costs, inefficiencies due to limited automation and don’t have the metrics to run your business you’ll realize you’ve actually made a costly decision.
Final thoughts…
If you are a small company, starting off with 1-2 reps and no real management, then probably something like Hubspot, Pipedrive or Close might be the best fit. If you are looking into a system that can support your business at scale, then Salesforce should be a no-brainer.
