I’d like to fully disclose that I’m not a Salesforce hater.
It’s a powerful tool, and a good alternative to HubSpot if it fits your organizational needs. But it’s not without its pitfalls, and isn’t always the best fit for every business. Because I have years of experience with both platforms, I thought it could be helpful to write up a couple of key reasons why so many businesses are migrating from Salesforce to HubSpot.
Related reading: How to Migrate from Salesforce to HubSpot
N0 More Data Silos
Salesforce is good, but it often needs to be patched together with numerous other systems in order to fit your business case. I’m sure you’ve experienced this too, where Marketing, Sales and Accounting all have their own databases, which feed into Salesforce in varying degrees of quality. While reporting disparities are their own separate genre of headaches, it simply comes down to information being squirrelled away in different places.
With HubSpot, all the data is in one platform. That means that you have all the context in one platform. It gives everyone a better view into business processes. This is great for both keeping everyone informed with the goings on of the business day-to-day. It’s less time spent hunting people down in different systems to get a better view of their activities.
Cost-Savings = Reinvest Money in Revenue Generation
When looking at the basic platform and the costs to get up and running, HubSpot is significantly more cost-effective than Salesforce while providing the power and feature most SMBs need. When businesses can pay say a third less in software costs and reduce the support costs that come with Salesforce consultants/administrators, that’s budget they can reinvest in business development to grow revenue.
Every organization is different, and while we can’t do an exact comparison. You can use our Total Costs of Ownership calculator here for a more comprehensive breakdown, and we go deeper on the comparison in this episode of Machine Logic:
Remove the Technicality for Automations
Don’t get me wrong, I love to write code. I’ve got the loud clacky keyboard to prove it. But I understand that not everyone needs that, nor wants it. Salesforce Flows are powerful and incredibly useful for automating processes. But building those processes out is a skill set built on years of context and trial and error.
I recently did a video on how to build a basic lead nurture process in both systems. You can watch it here if you’d like. Workflows are easier to build in HubSpot, and much more transparent.
But ease of use aside, the big benefit is that you can see exactly which workflows fired, and where it fired. That’s a massive difference, because you as the user get visibility. You don’t have to trawl through logs (if you have access), or check with an admin (if you have one) to see what’s going on with your leads. It’s all right there.
Better Ease of Use for Users
HubSpot is built for usability from the ground up. This is good for everyone, as it increases user adoption and reduces your time to value. This leads to fewer trainings and a reduced need for additional support for your end users.
Beyond the UI, the reporting feature on HubSpot is much more open and flexible. But instead of writing it up here, I can show you:
Certain things like averages, medians, and percentages are all available in Salesforce, but take some working knowledge to implement properly. HubSpot gives them to you straight away, which means more time getting insights from your data and less time wrestling with the system itself.
Compete With Your Competitors, Not Your CRM
Salesforce is like buying your own plot of land and building up your house from scratch. While it’s great if you have very specific organizational needs and the time to invest, it’s not for everyone. HubSpot is like buying a freshly built house. You can move in right away, and can make modifications as you go. While both have their benefits and downsides, HubSpot is suited to organizations where adoption and ease of use are paramount.
A lot of our clients complain about the excessive upkeep that Salesforce requires in order to run smoothly. It really comes down to a mis-match between what you need as a business and what Salesforce provides as a product. And Salesforce is very good at what it does, but it needs steady maintenance in order to be both reliable, and fit your evolving needs.
HubSpot is more adaptable because it has a unified architecture, and can adapt to your business needs with minimal friction.
There’s an old adage in systems thinking, coined by Stafford Beer: “The purpose of a system is what it does.“ It seems a little funny, and almost too obvious at first. But it cuts straight to the truth. Is your CRM emboldening your users, or is it giving them headaches?
Campaigns Are More Flexible
HubSpot’s Campaigns feature is simply better. In Salesforce, a Campaign is a single marketing event, while in HubSpot a Campaign is any grouping of any marketing asset. That’s multiple emails, ads, landing pages, events, forms, and more. And you can report on the influence of the entire campaign across asset types.
Put simply, you can measure effectiveness across your entire marketing suite, rather than just one email.
Continuous Improvement and New Features
With HubSpot, you get the option to enroll into beta features, and be the first to try out upcoming system updates. They come out with new features regularly. These can improve the functionality of your existing system, or introduce a new feature entirely. These are also features requested by the HubSpot community of users. So even though you might not have thought you needed it, you can take cues from the evolving processes of other businesses to inform your own. And that’s pretty cool.
We’ve helped many of our clients migrate from Salesforce to HubSpot. If you’re curious about how easy it is to switch, get in touch!
