The average business deals with customers, whether they are other businesses or an end user. Gaining oversight on elements such as last interactions, what they’ve purchased, what their business is about or where their project is at, can be categorised as customer relationship management. A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is the technology and processes that businesses use to manage and streamline these interactions.

So what are your 2 best options for CRM technology? Salesforce and HubSpot are two of the most popular CRM platforms available in the market today. While both platforms offer a range of features and capabilities, they have distinct differences between them. Conducting a quick google search will produce a magnitude of articles comparing the features of both platforms. In this article, we will explore the value that Salesforce vs HubSpot provides and help you decide which platform is best for your business.

Scalable Options

Both CRM options offer a system to track, manage and report on different processes throughout the business. The most noticeable difference between Salesforce and HubSpot lays in the customisation abilities. HubSpot allows you to create workflows, track automations, live chat and forecast. Salesforce takes these features and gives businesses the ability to completely customise them. Create custom fields, workflows and reports that track and record exactly what you need to see. A Salesforce partner will sit down with you and map out what your business needs to see, track and report on to ensure that all functions within your business are working within the system.

As your business grows and requires more customisation, Salesforce will allow for quicker expansion and responsiveness. Be proactive with your business and set yourself up from the beginning with a system designed to scale with your business. Small to medium businesses with the intention to grow and expand will gain real value from a system designed to scale.

Staff Training

HubSpot originally started as a Marketing platform who have moved across to the CRM space. Their understanding of marketing processes within business and the accessibility to manage marketing efforts through HubSpot has helped them climb to their seat at the table. However, their experience in the sales, service and CMS space is not as extensive as Salesforce. Trailhead is Salesforce’s educational and training network that has years worth of insightful and self help articles. Staff members have access to a world of knowledge to pull from when facing a challenge. myTrailhead allows you to create custom training modules specific to your Salesforce system to deploy company wide. Seamlessly provide staff with highly relevant training that will help them specifically in their position and their career to follow.

While HubSpot have an extensive range of marketing educational content, business owners need to evaluate where resources are best allocated. Is it valuable to utilise HubSpot for it’s marketing capabilities, when you could build out a knowledgeable internal marketing team who don’t require specific marketing systems or outsource to an agency? Is the business better off investing in a powerful Salesforce system that will benefit the company as a whole? Providing a platform for all staff to learn and develop while utilising rich systems to improve their everyday operations? We choose to utilise Salesforce for all our clients as we see that true value lays in a Salesforce investment.

Integrations

Part of scalability is the ability to bring everything into one place where it can all be managed as data, operations and systems expand. Both HubSpot and Salesforce have features that allow for an integration of operations however, the way in which they achieve this is different among the platforms. HubSpot is considered an all-in-one platform. Users can manage sales, marketing and service operations all from the one platform with a user-friendly interface. While this is excellent for the every day employee for their skill set, this places limits on the integrations available. Salesforce has a larger range of products available than HubSpot, which allow for further integrations. Although they are not part of the initial package and need to be bolted on, they enable that complete customisation that intricate businesses require.

Salesforce bolt on services provide clear and concise value to businesses with the ability to customise their functionality. When utilising a Salesforce implementation partner, they are able to provide you with the expertise and experience when selecting how to set up your business system. An initial consultation with a Salesforce partner will highlight the operations of your business, systems you already utilise, integrations that you require and recommendations that will initially set your operations up for greater success. Integrating third party platforms such as Xero, DocuSign, Trilio, Tableau, aws, Google, Storeconnect, Slack, Mailchimp and many others will bring the power of all these seperate tools into one manageable location. Allowing the free flow of data and operations into the one manageable and accessible platform is a highly valuable asset.

Reporting

Whether you spend $500 on marketing or $60,000 on advertising, the card holder will always want to know where the money went and what their ROI is. Reporting and the capacity to see exactly what dividends the budget spend is producing is critical in this day and age. There are plenty of platforms available to try and link up the flow of data, from google suit to individual reporting softwares. Even when utilising these platforms, it is impossible to get a full picture of ROI without a platform such as Salesforce or HubSpot. Salesforce allows a granular view of details to the extent of: what was the first marketing material they engaged with, how many emails have they opened, what links have they clicked on within those emails and on our website, when was the first time we contacted them, how many times have we contacted them since then and what date did they make a sale. The capacity to pull information like this from google ads, google analytics, various social media platforms, emails, display advertising and internal operational data is only available through Salesforce.

HubSpot has reporting dashboards and ROI capabilities however they are simply not up to par with Salesforce. If your business is serious about reporting and articulate about viewing the numbers, Salesforce is your only option. You may be sitting there thinking it’s impossible, it’s too good to be true, you’re friend tried this with his business and it didn’t work. Did you friend utilise Mensatech as their Salesforce implementation partner? Our understanding, expertise and track record will show you that this type of granular reporting is possible and accessible to businesses utilising Salesforce.

Marketing Integration

Marketing within businesses can sometimes be a touchy subject. Some see it as pretty posts on social media, others a way to get their messages into peoples personal inboxes, for others it’s one of the most important functions within their business. With technology growing at the rate it is and individuals becoming accustom to messages constantly in their face, the marketing space is evolving. Consumers don’t care about you, your messages or what you do unless it solves a problem for them. Whether that’s a revolutionary face cream, a quality cleaning service or a dress that will make them the talk of the wedding. Even then, how do you convince them that your product/service is superior? That it aligns with their personal values and will deliver the result they expect? Nurturing your customers or clients and providing them with value is the most important thing you can do.

The marketing space has your typical activations you can produce. A social media schedule, google ads, emails, social media ads and linkedin. Salesforce and HubSpot both allow for integration with your CRM systems so that you can create, schedule and see the value that these activations are bringing in. However, Salesforce allows your marketing activations to feed data to your sales CRM. For example, your weekly email that was jam packed with offers and talks about a few different activations occurring your business. When a prospect clicks on one of those links, data will be recorded against their lead profile and fed to your sales system so that by the time your sales team gets the lead, they have a track record of all the marketing banners, promotions and buttons they’ve clicked on leading up to this point. This improves the quality of the conversation your sales rep is having with that customer, increasing customer satisfaction and eventually brand loyalty.

Pardot is the marketing bolt on Salesforce uses to automate and streamline marketing functions. The greatest feature about Pardot is the ability to create a customer journey to then create and automate the nurturing process. Build emails, landing pages and custom targeted messages delivered to specific groups of people on a specific part in their purchasing journey. With a system like this set up within your business, marketing functions become a part of your business functions and a key element in the way you communicate with prospects. Experiences Salesforce partners will be able to manage these systems and set up these targeted messages for you so that you can spend your time prioritising what you do best in your business.

Affordability

At the end of the day it all comes down to price. HubSpot is cheaper than Salesforce by a decent amount. However once you inspect the value and capabilities of the platform that you’re paying for, value should be the biggest deciding factor. Salesforce has capabilities that HubSpot just doesn’t have, which may turn out to be detrimental to your business operations. If your comparing Salesforce and HubSpot, chances are you’re looking for a platform that’s going to bring all functions into one spot, streamline your business and make operations easier. Invest in your business and work with a Salesforce partner to get your CRM set up the way you need it to be set up from the start.

Get a Salesforce Partner Involved Early

Working within the tech industry, we’ve researched and experimented with all types of CRM systems. We believe that the value provided by a Salesforce CRM is superior to the other systems we’ve implemented. The greatest advice we can give is to utilise a Salesforce implementation partner early. The knowledge and expertise an implementation consultant brings will elevate your system. Speak to our team at Mensatech to see how a system upgrade will bring value to your business.