Salesforce has been the default safe choice CRM for a long time, especially for growing teams that don’t want to bet wrong on their core revenue system. But a trend is building: more companies are actively moving off Salesforce and onto HubSpot, and it’s not just because of price tags on a licensing page.
In the recent uptick in Salesforce to HubSpot migration projects we’ve been taken on, we’ve seen a few recurring themes pop up. Teams feel the strain of paying for complexity they don’t use, relying on specialized admins or outside consultants for basic changes and watching their CRM become a cost center instead of a growth engine. (Read the Salesforce to HubSpot migration case studies here and here.)
In the video below, we break down what’s really driving the switch: the true cost picture once you factor in implementation, integrations, admin overhead, and time-to-value — and how HubSpot has evolved into a much more serious mid-market contender. When you’re under pressure to do more with less, the CRM that your teams actually use (and can adapt quickly) starts to matter a lot more than the one with the most features on paper.
Watch the Discussion
Transcript
Hi, and welcome back to another edition of Machine Logic. I’m Jill. This is my partner, Charlie of Simple Machines. And today we are talking, this is going to be part one in a two part series about why companies are switching from Salesforce to HubSpot. Charlie, we are fresh off, a couple Salesforce to HubSpot migration projects, one with a paint manufacturer and the other a global cybersecurity firm.
And advisory. And the same pattern keeps showing up. What are they what what are what what have you been hearing? Yeah, I mean, there’s some differences, but there are some commonalities. And I would say the big ones, probably the most obvious would be cost. And we’ll talk about this. But I think companies especially right now are seeing that they are under pressure to do more with less budget.
They marketing and sales teams are trying to find places to put back into revenue generating channels and resources. And when they have an opportunity to move some of that out of software in into those places, that’s a big opportunity for them. So cost is a big one. And I think the other big one is just the complexity and the fatigue of dealing with a CRM that is creating more headaches than it’s solving.
Right? So today we’re breaking down the real reasons for the switch and what the cost picture looks like when you truly factor in everything. So, Charlie, one of the things you mentioned was fatigue. The that oftentimes these platforms are over engineered into complexity. That is way beyond what any organization would need. And how that complexity creates a lot of it dependency.
So can you speak a little to that? For sure. And it’s worth throwing a lot of these companies there that they bought Salesforce because it’s it’s the market leader. It’s best in class. The safe bet you won’t get fired for for onboarding with Salesforce. And then I think at a certain point reality hits where they are realizing they’re using maybe a quarter or less of the features and functionality that Salesforce has.
At the same time, they’re having trouble getting their teams to use it because like you mentioned, Salesforce, the user experience is very much I.T world versus like sales, marketing and service folks, where it’s more intuitive, which is where where HubSpot really plays more. So there’s this confluence of of pain for them, where it’s a lot of complexity and to get what they need out of Salesforce, I think what we see is either they have a very high paid Salesforce admin that is doing this, and it’s and that’s a big cost center for them.
Or they have, you know, an outsource consultancy that even when it comes to simple updates that they need made, it can be days or longer to get these things done, and then it’s just not acceptable for them. Totally true. Yeah. A lot of te, tales from the front that we’ve been hearing on these latest projects, has been people getting stuck waiting on admins, whether in house or externally, to make simple changes.
And just that, the add ons for things like integrations and support and development have have spiraled. And how it has just become a, cost center versus a revenue driver. Yeah. I mean we can give examples. There is, there was one where it was actually this is an instance where at the time they had HubSpot and Salesforce connected and there was a sync error because the field and one and HubSpot had a had a lower character limit than in Salesforce.
And simply to cap the field character limit on Salesforce, we had to call this guy. We had two meetings. It was like two weeks later before we got this resolved. And I think that was one of the straw that broke the camel’s back. In that case, for sure. So, you know, you mentioned that most people were going with Salesforce as it was a market leader couldn’t make a bad decision.
So why is HubSpot now more of a serious alternative? What what’s changed? Right. Yeah. I mean, in the old days, right. HubSpot was very much SMB marketing automation. And over the years they’ve been pivoting. But I think especially in the last, you know, 12 to 24 months, they’ve made a very concerted effort to move upmarket and be more of a true sort of mid-market solution.
So there’s quite a bit that goes into that. I mean, part of it is features that the bigger companies need is like, you know, more nuanced permission sets. The custom reporting has come leaps and bounds from where it used to be. There are things like multiple multi-account management where, let’s say you’re venture capital, rolling up a bunch of firms.
Now, you can manage multiple accounts with one admin, which in the old days was not a single. HubSpot was able to provide. I’d say privacy and security is a big one too. So being able to use HubSpot and still be compliant with things like, and financial securities are going to be, a big reason why it’s more mid-market friendly.
And I think just being, having a UI that is just more sort of front office friendly is just helping some of these companies faster, faster adoption, faster time to value versus Salesforce. Or it’s going to be just a long until battle. Yep. Faster time to value is important, not just with initial onboarding for something new, but also from a migration standpoint is as you’re moving away.
The Multi-account management angle is interesting. You know, as you noted, you know, one of the examples of the projects that we that that I think you gave as an example was, a private equity, platform that was rolling up multiple commercial Hvac companies and being able to manage that, with, with the separate permissions and brands is something that that HubSpot has really done a great job of.
That’s a good summary of sort of the feature side. I think the other component of this is, is the cost, like we were alluding to the beginning. So, you know, if you’re if you’re a small business or mid-market and you’re trying to free up budget for more revenue generating activity, like how much are we talking about? This could potentially be a very wide ranging conversation because I think the bottom line here is the licensing cost is one part of this, the total cost of ownership, there’s a lot of here.
And what we can do is take a quick look. We have a resource that kind of outlines some of this, using some research. But what you’ll see is so this is comparing HubSpot enterprise versus Salesforce Enterprise. Yes, there are differences in terms of the license cost. But where you can imagine this getting a really impactful is when you consider things like how much it’s costing not only to onboard, implement data migration.
Integrations. How much are you paying someone to manage this? You know, HubSpot admin in the low 70s versus multiple Salesforce folks who’ve, you know, gone through all of the paid, training and accreditations that are needed for them to have those jobs is, not even close. I mean, that’s a huge difference. And then similarly, I think one thing that can be overlooked is what is included in HubSpot versus what’s included out of the box or Salesforce.
So even things like, you know, going above 100,000 API calls in a day, if you’ve got a lot of integrations, that’s huge. Data storage, if you’re going over ten gigabytes, even things like that. Yeah. If you’re looking for add ons like sales email, you know, an alerts sales calling like enterprise companies especially, but even mid-market and these are all in place.
So those those costs add up really quick. For sure. Yeah. Hearkening back again to this speed of value the Salesforce onboarding take months. Like you said, you can still see spotty adoption faster time to value something that’s that’s here. And just, you know, the lower training burden. Right. The opportunity cost and the upside is huge indeed.
Yeah. I mean, that’s that’s the exact stuff we’re hearing from from people we’re working with. So it makes sense that we’re seeing this tick up from an a, training and adoption standpoint. It’s not just about switching to what’s cheaper, but, what’s more geared toward go to market professionals versus I.T and developers? It’s about switching to something that those folks will actually use and want to use, and to see that cost match the value.
Definitely. Cool. If you’re curious how your own total cost of ownership stacks up, we’ll share a calculator in the notes, for, for you to use. And in the next video we’ll break down the onboarding experience. So what a Salesforce to HubSpot migration actually looks like where teams are getting the fastest wins. And what features are driving, adoption, not just for small businesses, but for mid-market too.
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