HubSpot vs. Salesforce: Which is right for you in 2023?

33% of consumers would consider switching companies immediately after poor customer service.* -American Express

In the modern world, while price and product quality are the two most crucial factors, customer service emerges as a pivotal factor in brand selection. Today’s customers prioritize brands that cater to their needs and consistently deliver value beyond the initial purchase. Did you know that as per HubSpot Research, 93% of customers are likely to make repeat purchases with companies that offer excellent customer service?*

Here CRM tools like HubSpot and Salesforce come into play.

The right customer relationship management (CRM) tool can effectively capture valuable insights into what your customers actually want. It simplifies everyday tasks like generating leads, managing customer data, marketing, sales, support, and more through automation. Furthermore, a CRM platform empowers employees to concentrate on their customers and deliver an outstanding experience, every time.

HubSpot and Salesforce stand out as two widely embraced CRM solutions in the current market. They cater to businesses of varying sizes, ranging from small enterprises to large organizations. Hence, understanding the key features, pros, and cons of each can help you choose the right CRM software for your organization.

HubSpot Overview

HubSpot is an innovative cloud-based CRM platform designed to simplify both sales and marketing tasks for all types of businesses. With HubSpot CRM, your team can make their inbound marketing strategies more effective and generate better leads to bring in more sales easily.

HubSpot consolidates all your digital marketing activities into one, cloud-hosted platform, allowing you to handle website hosting, email marketing, blogging, and other tasks. HubSpot also contains operations capabilities and provides HubSpot CMS, a full-fledged content management system, so your marketing, sales, and operations teams can collaborate effortlessly.

Salesforce Overview

Salesforce is one of the most popular CRM solutions in the market, and it dominates the CRM software industry by a huge margin. Salesforce’s objective is to help you build your business by improving business interactions.

Salesforce enables businesses to develop connections with customers, suppliers, partners, users, and more. All interactions between the firm and its customers, including emails, chats, SMS, phone calls, and support tickets, may be tracked by your sales and marketing teams. Salesforce empowers your teams to standardize the sales process, allowing them to close deals more rapidly.

HubSpot vs. Salesforce: Similarities and Differences

Similarities between HubSpot and Salesforce

HubSpot is primarily recognized as an inbound marketing tool, while Salesforce is best known as a sales automation platform, yet they both provide similar sets of features:

• Capabilities: HubSpot and Salesforce both deliver robust, all-in-one CRM capabilities suitable for businesses of all sizes.
• User Friendliness: Both interfaces incorporate dashboards to streamline navigation, facilitate sales management, and track marketing campaign operations. Additionally, both platforms help during the setup process.
• Price Structure: Both systems provide subscription-based plans that encompass a monthly charge, extra fees for more users, and an implementation cost.
• Apps and Integrations: Both CRM platforms facilitate the integration of third-party apps and maintain their marketplaces for applications. Furthermore, each platform offers a dedicated mobile app for users’ convenience.
• Customization: Both CRM tools support customization, process automation, and report generation.

Differences between HubSpot and Salesforce

Now, let’s walk through some of the main differences between HubSpot and Salesforce. Here’s a quick breakdown of how their key features compare:

Onboarding Experience with HubSpot and Salesforce

Source: Pexels

Both HubSpot and Salesforce CRM platforms excel in providing effective onboarding experiences for their users. Each CRM platform offers a unique approach to guiding users through their features and functionalities.

HubSpot CRM takes a hands-on approach to onboarding. Upon logging in, it offers a series of steps that lead users through essential tasks to kickstart their journey. The platform’s layout is designed to be intuitive, with clear guidance on tasks to be completed. This dynamic and user-friendly onboarding process is particularly beneficial for new HubSpot users, as it reduces the time for the onboarding process.

In contrast, Salesforce CRM adopts a slightly more independent onboarding strategy. It uses pop-ups to offer guidance and quick demos as users explore various features. A help dropdown in the top navigation menu provides problem-specific resources. However, Salesforce’s dashboard can be quite challenging to navigate, as it organizes features into individual apps rather than central categories like Sales, Marketing, or Contacts. This can require users to search for specific apps by name, potentially confusing, especially for those new to the platform.

HubSpot’s advantage lies in its streamlined layout, where many of its apps and features are seamlessly integrated. These features are logically categorized, and if an app isn’t available for a particular plan, a clear icon indicates the need for an upgrade.

Customization capabilities – HubSpot and Salesforce

When it comes to layout customization, Salesforce emerges as the frontrunner. It offers a great customization experience. This includes the ability to integrate apps, page layout changes, or mixing and matching supplementary tools. Salesforce also offers custom coding features, allowing you to personalize your CRM software to a great extent.

In contrast, HubSpot boasts a respectable level of individual feature customization. It enables the creation of workflows, reports, and daily tasks either from scratch or through templates. HubSpot also offers GitHub integration, allowing for project code storage and enhanced GitHub tool functionality. The HubSpot CMS also facilitates the development of custom webpages, blogs, forms, and basic apps. However, HubSpot CRM doesn’t provide the comprehensive customization capabilities that you find with Salesforce’s custom coding.

Productivity Tools- HubSpot and Salesforce

Source: Pexels

Salesforce presents several notable features within its Sales Cloud offering. It offers tools that guide sales representatives through the processes of prospecting and nurturing opportunities. It also notifies representatives regarding the optimal timing for actions like emailing prospects, making calls, and waiting for responses. Additionally, Sales Cloud Einstein, an AI-powered service, can be seamlessly integrated into Salesforce CRM, delivering a range of predictive and analytical insights. However, it’s important to note that the utilization of Sales Cloud Einstein often requires add-ons.

In contrast, HubSpot distinguishes itself through its Sales Hub capabilities. This platform empowers users to generate precise sales forecasts, efficiently manage sales pipelines, and optimize revenue generation by prioritizing key deals. HubSpot’s comprehensive system facilitates the storage, tracking, management, and reporting of each customer interaction throughout the sales cycle. This encompasses the ability to create customized reports that monitor the specific deal metrics and performance indicators that are most pertinent to your business objectives.

Advantages: HubSpot and Salesforce

HubSpot:

• User-friendly and intuitive interface.
• Is an all-in-one CRM solution.
• Real-time alerts for lead activities.
• Enables personalized email sequences for leads and current customers.
• Highly adaptable and customizable.
• Offers an extensive collection of templates.

Salesforce:

• User-friendly interface for smooth navigation.
• Flexibility to add or remove features based on requirements.
• Customizable dashboards.
• Built-in social media capabilities.
• Extensive array of integration possibilities.
• Salesforce Database for efficient organization of sales records.
• Capability to integrate with various data sources.

HubSpot and Salesforce Plans

HubSpot CRM Plans

HubSpot offers these plans for different functions:

• Marketing Hub: This is for inbound marketing and includes tools for email marketing, lead generation, social media management, and analytics.
• Sales Hub: This is for sales teams and provides features for CRM (Customer Relationship Management), sales automation, and sales analytics.
• Service Hub: This is for customer service and support teams, offering features for ticketing, knowledge base, live chat, and customer feedback.
• CMS Hub: This is for content management and helps with website creation, hosting, and optimization.
• Operations Hub: This is designed to help with automating and streamlining various business operations, such as data syncing, workflow automation, and reporting.

For more comprehensive details about HubSpot plans and pricing, you can click here.

Salesforce CRM Plans

Salesforce offers these plans for various product categories:

• Small Business: Sales, service, and marketing tools.
• Sales Cloud: Sales automation and analytics capabilities.
• Service Cloud: Offers multi-channel support, support and service features, automation and analytics capabilities.
• Marketing Cloud: Salesforce’s marketing automation platform offers various plans for different marketing needs. These can include features like email marketing, journey builder, and audience segmentation.
• Commerce: It helps businesses build and manage online stores and offers various features for B2B and B2C commerce.
• App Cloud: It offers development tools for building custom applications.
• Industry-specific solutions: It offers templates for various sectors, such as financial services, healthcare, and manufacturing.

And a lot more. Keep in mind that Salesforce regularly updates its offerings and introduces new products. To get more details, you can contact Salesforce directly.

HubSpot vs. Salesforce: Which is right for you?

Overall, HubSpot and Salesforce provide almost similar features such as CRM, marketing, sales, and analytics tools – they just package them differently.

In short, HubSpot offers a great user interface, step-by-step guidance, and better marketing and sales capabilities, while Salesforce has an upper hand in reporting and personalization.

Because both alternatives provide almost the same benefits, the best place to begin is to compile a list of price-influencing parameters such as must-have features, number of contacts, and number of users. This will give you an estimate of the pricing bundle you require.

ZNetLive is a HubSpot partner and has expertise in implementing and managing the HubSpot CRM software for you. Interested to learn more? Get in touch with us for a quick demo!

*Source:
American Express

HubSpot Research

Disclaimer: The information provided in this article is based on publicly available sources and is intended for general information purpose only. While we provide accurate and up-to-date information, readers are advised to research or consult with relevant industry experts before making any decisions based on the information provided.