Bombora vs. HubSpot Marketing Hub

Bombora is the perfect tool for anyone looking to understand their B2B customer and their buyer's journey better. Companies produce tons of content - and pay lots of money creating and then amplifying it too. But is it really what the customer is interested in? Now you don't have to guess, you can know thanks to company surge data.

Incentivized

As I said previously, I was not a fan at the beginning because, like everyone, I don't take change so well. Once I started following leads through HubSpot Marketing Hub, I integrated it with my email and created templates for what I needed, I started to see the positives immediately. My time working was better spent as I eliminated time put in routine tasks. I was able to track all communication in HubSpot Marketing Hub, we created systems in the office assigning tasks to one another and, through HubSpot Marketing Hub, our leads were able to book meetings in my calendar automatically. To be honest, if you are in sales and marketing, I cannot think of scenarios where HubSpot Marketing Hub cannot help. All I would like to say is, when using templates, pay attention to where you send them - you may need some personalization. I would encourage the management of HubSpot Marketing Hub to create short tutorials for beginners like me who need to configure and start using various features: setting up deals, templates, and dashboards.

Incentivized

• Intent topics, as well as the clusters tied to them, have enabled our PMMs to be more granular with specific workloads that are based on industry.
• The "Account Intent" option within the "Insights" tab allowed us to look specifically into historical data tied to current activities that we were experiencing with that account.

Incentivized

• All-in-one software - the main thing HubSpot does well is the breadth of functionality.
• Easy of use - personally, I find it more intuitive than Marketo, which is the other MAP that I know well.
• Ads - I like that we can drill down on ads by channel, ad group, campaign, and even create and see performance data at each level.

Incentivized

• Downloading intent data and trying to use it outside of their environment is tricky because the data is essentially one large worksheet. We want to overlay the data with our own data but joining it all together is tricky. Our data comes from D&B so the names provided by D&B don't always match what we get from Bombora so account matching is not very clean.
• Customer service is a bit hit or miss. I worked with an account rep to try and resolve it but she couldn't. However, she did open a ticket with the Bombora help desk to try and get me answers. I waited more than a week and got no answer. I followed up and the reply was the original owner of the ticket is out and the new ticket owner was wondering if I had rerun the report to see if the problem went away.
• Despite having a self-service type set up for the dashboards and reports, trying to understand what exactly needs to be filled in isn't always easy. The data doesn't match up with what we download so trying to compare the dashboards/reports to the extract is next to impossible?! It shouldn't be this way.

Incentivized

• While Hubspot has added some collaborative tools, I think this could improve. I'd like to see more options to comment on emails and ways of being able to share out changes as well as approval channels.
• The ability to update ads via the calendar is pretty cumbersome. There's no good way to bulk edit or update. You have go into each one individually.
• Real time edits would be nice. If you have multiple people working on the same thing, you'll get kicked out and your changes might not be saved.

Incentivized

Our business relies on the HubSpot platform to manage our marketing, sales and CRM processes. HubSpot marketing automation helps us define our activities and streamlines them in a cohesive and efficient way. Without HubSpot, we will have to revert to the 'old way' of doing everything with a variety of disparate systems.

Incentivized

I give Bombora an 8 as they do intent well for now. Not a 10 because again its a one trick pony where there are other platforms like ZoomInfo that offer intent as well plus so much more. From an end user perspective, I'd like Bombora to build out first party intent data capabilities to combine into the scoring.

Incentivized

While there are some frustrating things that pop up unexpectedly ("wait... I can't do X?"), I have found HubSpot to be easy to use and extremely helpful to my daily work. The documentation is really good, and when it's not helpful, the support staff have been amazing.

Incentivized

They have had issues with system availability over the course of days. Sometimes the system is unusable, other times updates simply take a long time to show up. It's better now but, from a reliaibility standpoint, HubSpot is not Salesforce.com yet. Still great software though.

With all the new features in HubSpot, the system can get a tad slow sometimes... That said, most of the time it is lightning fast and I have no problems. Because most of the integrations are API, they silently work in the background. I have not had trouble with lag due to HubSpot integration

Our CSM team is always available for us to meet with via an outreach click to book an invite and we have standing meetings. They met with us on day 1 of implementation and had us up and running that evening. They even go to the lengths of matching industry tenured folks with us to help us move faster.

During the few times I've needed it, HS support has been accessible, helpful and efficient. Often rolling up their sleeves to make changes for you as opposed to leaving you with a list of instructions to decipher on your own.

I did the 2-day classroom at HubSpot's corporate office in Cambridge. First off, it was amazing to see their corporate office in general. They have such a cool office environment. But it was also great to have the ability to learn in a workshop format with other HubSpot users and meet my Account Manager/ Inbound Marketing Consultant in person.

There is a room for improvement in a layman's perspective as it was difficult for our to understand things during training and had to rearrange sessions.

Incentivized

I went through Inbound Marketing University in 2006. Great training and helped my transition from traditional (outbound) marketing to inbound marketing that I've been able to apply to a number of businesses from wastewater and water reuse, to professional services and SaaS. Share information of value to build awareness and trust. Answer customers' questions in a transparent way to generate more qualified leads. Understand the difference between a marketing qualified lead and a sales qualified lead and put together a lead nurturing program. Your sales and marketing efforts will see significant ROI.

Liked the implementation, however there is a still room for improvement for the support needed in overall implementation

Incentivized

My biggest piece of advice for those who are implementing Hubspot is that you need to devote the time up front and learn how to use the product. Once you learn how to use Hubspot, it will be much more effective as well as much easier to use in the long run

Bombora doesn't give you a token for the number of accounts that are populated. You can search and request as many as you'd like. With other platforms, they provide you a token, and if you use all your tokens for the month, then you have to wait til next month.

Incentivized

Other competing software such as Zoho and Boomtown may have more bells and whistles, but it is too cumbersome and has many parts that only advanced users can operate. With HubSpot, each function is within reach of the average agent. It doesn't overpromise and then makes you feel incompetent when you can't use it all...

Incentivized

Need improvement in places such as visualisation & UX

Incentivized

HubSpot is addressing this more and more. Currently you can assign tasks to designated sales teams, which grow as you grow. They've added free baseline products for those just getting started. These and more contribute to the scalability of HubSpot - so I gave it an 8 and am hoping for more in the future!

• Bombora played a big role in us proving the effectiveness of ABM for our organization and had a huge impact on us gaining approval for a full ABM platform.
• Bombora helped us identify key target accounts that brought great net new business to our company.

Incentivized

• HubSpot has helped us increased our lead generation.
• HubSpot has allowed us to continue to grow our customer base without having to spend a ton of marketing dollars on advertising.
• HubSpot has allowed our company to standardize our process and bring the company onto one platform for sales and marketing.

Incentivized