HubSpot CRM vs. Salesforce Marketing Cloud

I have used HubSpot CRM to help grow and scale companies which range in size from SMB businesses owned by one person up through enterprise companies doing hundreds of millions in revenue. There are not any use cases where HubSpot CRM has not been able to suit the needs for what we've needed from it.

I rated this a seven because I love Salesforce, and it is excellent on the sales side. However, the marketing side has some pros and cons. It is terrific for keeping track of lead, customer, and dealer information, but it is not easy to automate workflows, integrate other software, or create well-designed emails. It is also straightforward to generate reports, which is very helpful in keeping track of lead progression to better market those leads and turn them into customers.

Incentivized

• Personalized email campaigns: It helps to create highly effective personalized emails with its wonderful content tokens.
• Scheduling of meetings: It eliminates the bottlenecks in the process of meeting schedule with its amazing integrating capabilities with other calendar tools like Google calendar. It also ensures the automatic reminders of meetings to the participants of meeting.
• Automation for follow-up : With its feature called "sequences", follow-up emails made easy.

Incentivized

• Filter relevant content so you can priorize those that are more relevant and resolve it first
• Measure the traffic in the different social networks, as well as the response rate, average response time and other relevant metrics
• Configure automation rules to order the work of those who must interact with the customer

Incentivized

• A lot of my companies have one URL for a ton of branches and each branch has their own name and location so I have to manually enter all the information because they all have the same URL so I can't easily use an Excel file to import those contacts so a faster solution to this would be appreciated
• Making Corporate and branch associations is very tedious, it would be nice if the companies that all share the same url would automatically associate with the corporate company so I didn't have to manually do it
• I would like to not see all the extra feature tabs in my layout because I am not using them so it would be nice to be able to turn them off (even the ones that are in my plan that I don't use, it would be nice to turn them off)

Incentivized

• The email builder does not offer any way to catch/check bugs across different email service providers
• Creating SQL is not as easy as drag-and-drop; a lot of technical knowledge is required
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud is sold as a marketing tool, but to be honest, you need a LOT of technical IT support to run the tool
• Einstein metrics are across the board; if you have multiple audiences in one instance of Salesforce Marketing Cloud you can't segment the data.

Incentivized

To be honest there are some barriers due to which we are unable to use Hubspot at it's full potentials. The region that we work in has some restrictions that don't allow us to make calls or text which leaves us to just Email to the client.

Incentivized

As of right now we have not seen any other program that integrates as seamlessly into our Salesforce platform. We have barely scratched the surface of all the features and use cases. It would be irresponsible to make a move to another platform in the near future. We have not come up against any limitations that would prompt a need to switch

I give it this rating because when I first joined the team here I had never used HubSpot before. Within a week I was up to speed on the CRM and knew pretty much how to use it based on its user friendliness. The different tabs on the side and organization of the site did not make me anxious when I first started which is hard to say for most CRM platforms because their can be A LOT going on on but, HubSpot has been my favorite CRM thus far and being in marketing the last 7, going on 8 years now I have worked with PLENTY of CRM's

Incentivized

You won't find another solution that has as many features as Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio. We all know Salesforce, we all know how big they are and it's not for nothing... Their tools do most of the things you want, need and even imagine. Using it is complicated, but the usability is infinite.

Incentivized

Upgrades and timing of the upgrades were communicated well and planned during off hours for our work. If we did have a campaign scheduled during that time, it would kick-off after the system was back active. There were a few unplanned system down times, but it was a rare occurrence and those times were also short in duration.

Though the make up of MA apps is not built this way today, it would be nice to see them become more real-time. The integration between Salesforce and Pardot is not a true real-time integration. If I modify something in Salesforce, those changes are not automatically reflected in Pardot immediately. There is a delay of about 15 minutes before the systems sync. This delay, although not long, is less than ideal We would love the systems to be integrated real time such that changes are propagated from one system to the other immediately.

Because when I needed help HubSpot responded immediately and provided me with the information I needed which enabled me to realize that HubSpot was even more customizable and easier to use than I thought! And I already thought HubSpot was very user friendly and easy to use, and then Support showed me how to manipulate the settings, columns and the appearance of the tool.

Incentivized

They are really responsive and more than not solve the problem or give you insight to how you can manage the solution yourself. I do find however sometimes a long delay on the more complex issues when they need to loop in other departments. but overall a good experience with support

Incentivized

The trainers at the Pardot user conference (Elevate and Connections) were very knowledgeable and presented the material well. Again, the content was targeted to more of a new user audience, and was not really relevant for folks who had been using the product for 2+ years.

Pardot's online training touches on all topics briefly and vaguely without much indepth exploration into how a final outcome could look, such as Nurturing Campaigns, Email templates, landing page templates, etc... The only true way to uncover Pardot's full capabilities is to have Front End design and coding experience. Without this key skill set, I would not recommend Pardot to another business.

If you've had any prior experience with cloud based marketing automation or group communication tools, you can do the implementation without paid outside support. Though getting to a SLA (service level agreement) would be best achieved with the help of a third party who can facilitate

Incentivized

From an IT perspective, once you set up the Javascript beacon and start collecting data there is a waiting game. During this time you can start labeling your site actions which can be labor intensive for a single person, but you don't really have the final end-users on the platform yet. We did a lot of training so users were experienced, but it wasn't until they had their first tasks to accomplish that they started using the system and had questions. I'd recommend setting up some immediate goals for an end-user to start segmenting for the purpose of displaying message campaigns so you can jump start end-user action.

I have used two other CRM systems; they were in-house at my company, so I can't search for them in the list. Previous CRM systems ran very sluggishly, lacking many features such as transactions. Very often, they did not add sent emails or added them incorrectly. Adding contacts was unintuitive and had a lot of mandatory fields that had to be filled in manually, as this system did not download data online. There was no option to search if a lead existed; there was a function that theoretically should have notified of a duplicate, but only after the entire long list was filled out.

Incentivized

I think that all of the marketing platforms I have evaluated and used in the past serve different markets and purposes. Salesforce Marketing Cloud was more palatable to our team because of our existing tech stack where we had Salesforce CRM already deployed and in use. Compared to Marketo and Hubspot, Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a bit dated in terms of the UI/UX and the overall experience but still meets the needs of our organization. Mailchimp, however, isn't even playing in the same arena and is meant for small organizations and companies that don't have a need for a full fledged offering that SFMC brings to the table.

Incentivized

was not involved with this part but i have not heard about clompaints

Incentivized

Prior to this, we had no solution and literally were doing things on paper in a world where technology is outpacing paper. Having this process optimized has made it easier for the sales and marketing people to change information. From the training perspective, it has allowed us to see holes in where we could create additional support training, so the ROI here has been a lot more than just the optimization of a process.

Incentivized

• We can raise the tickets easily from HubSpot only. There is no confusion about that.
• There is difficulty raising tickets from Hubspot as once it is resolved, we will not be able to check again on the deal overview that needs to be solved.
• HubSpot is very good compared to Salesforce and Zoho, as I have worked on all 3 till now.

Incentivized

• Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows us to more efficiently reach out to a higher number of prospects.
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows us to nimbly communicate important messages in a timely fashion to facilitate conversion.
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows us to track who is opening our messages so that we can stop sending to those not interested and focus on the most engaged audiences.

Incentivized