HubSpot Sales Hub vs. Salesforce Sales Cloud

Sales hub is an excellent tool for a sales professional, probably even the best tool available in the industry without a doubt. However it could be much less convenient for outside sales reps that need to consistently meet people in person, it has some features to cater to these reps but they aren't as robust as the ones designed for inside sales reps.

Sales Cloud is very well suited for the daily leads and opportunity pipeline management as well as user management. Sales process automation are very helpful for repetitive tasks. It integrates well with other platforms. It's easy to customize and report on data. Sales Cloud can be pricey so is only open to larger org's that need complex CRM. User adoption is slow to any new users that have no prior experience.

Incentivized

• The task feature of HubSpot has been super helpful for me to organize what activities I am focusing on throughout the day. Instead of having a generalized list of the activities that need to take place today, I can organize that list by calls, emails, to-do's, linked-in, etc. That way I can take an hour of my time and focus on only doing phone calls, only doing emails, etc. It has helped me increase my productivity by making 20 phone calls a day to 100 phone calls throughout the day.
• Hubspot Sequences are also super helpful in order to plug and play contacts that need similar solutions. The automatic email feature allows me to not have to spend time sending a simple email template. Instead, it automatically sends that email out at the time that THEY would most likely respond.
• This gives me more time to focus on the tasks that I can't automate, allowing me to be way more productive. I can also customize my sequences to automate when I am reaching out, and what activity I am doing.
• Sequences give me the ability to create a highly customized approach, with the scalability of a plug and play format.

Incentivized

• Logging notes: SF makes it easy to log notes in the timeline or static notes that live in an easy-to-see spot for longevity.
• Logging activities: It's easy to post a call, text, email, etc.
• API data: Once connected, SF is critical to automation, such as website activity, login activity, pages visited, etc., which saves the Customer Success side time in understanding account activity.
• Custom fields: you can add custom fields to really personalize your experience. We use quite a few and it's brilliant.

Incentivized

• I find the interface to be a bit unorganized and sometimes the information added about projects looks clogged which sometimes makes it difficult to access specific information.
• Sometimes we have to deal with different currencies because we have clients all over the world but the exchange rate tool is not always accurate, causing us to slow down our work.

Incentivized

• I have hard-coded the auto-update of the phone number format and state format from some codes shared by the community, but I do not know where to do it. I cannot reset it either.
• It is unclear what functionalities each version has. We use the enterprise version, and it seems we can only have one design of the pipeline. But different business segments would have very different sales cycles, and hence, pipeline tracking would be different. It would be nice to have this available in our version.
• It seems I cannot create a report to pull notes logged at the account levels.

Incentivized

Ease of use, ease of customizability, and ease of 3rd-party integration, especially to LinkedIn Navigator, all play a vital role in our increasing reliance of HubSpot Sales for our growing sales team. Also taking into account the great training and support for HubSpot Sales available from HubSpot, including HubSpot Academy.

Incentivized

There are days when I wish we hadn't switched, but I know that if we put in the time, we will get to where we want to be with the software and that it has many more capabilities than anything else we looked at. However, the amount of time and onboarding we need to do is also far greater than we realized/were told when we originally bought the product. They told us we should hire onboarding support, but at the end, after we had already reached our budget maximum for this, so it's been slower than we had hoped.

Incentivized

Since we launched HubSpot Sales Hub into our organisation's tech stack, we've experienced a smooth transition and implementation process for those using this solution. The ease of use and the interface experience is amazing and that was a main priority for us in the purchasing phase. So far, we've been nothing but very happy with the support, implementation, and ongoing development of our sales team adapting to the solution. Highly recommend it for usability and functionality!

Incentivized

Salesforce has been designed on the basis of "Clicks, not code". So anyone willing to learn the Salesforce user interface (which is quite good as far as management software platforms go) is able to become a Salesforce user or even a Salesforce administrator. You don't have to know coding language to work in the Salesforce environment. Also, Salesforce has one of the best software training resources (Trailhead) that I have ever encountered. It is free to all, easy to use, and most importantly it is interactive. No scrolling through endless text in a user manual. There are hands-on modules and related videos interlaced and through it all you earn points and badges to display your level of learning.

Incentivized

Salesforce is always available securely from any internet-capable device anywhere in the world, UNLESS you choose to set security measures so that ONLY trusted IP ranges may access the system at certain times of the day. It's all about choice and flexibility with Salesforce products.

Incentivized

Salesforce performance in general is excellent. "The cloud infrastructure beneath Force.com has been fine-tuned over the past 10 years. It powers nearly 100,000+ businesses running more than 185,000 applications that 3 million users count on every day."
Points per Salesforce -
1) Multitenant kernel - With a multitenant platform, each business that uses the app doesn’t have its own copy. Instead, all businesses share a single copy and then customize it for their specific needs.
2) ISO 27001 certified security - You can’t compromise when it comes to enterprise-level security. Force.com is road-tested and trusted by nearly 100,000+ companies, including many of the world’s most security-conscious organizations, such as banks and health care providers.
3) Proven reliability - All Force.com apps run on world-class data centers with backup, failover, and disaster-recovery facilities. Force.com has had a proven 99.9 percent uptime record for years.
4) Proven, real-time scalability - Force.com is used by many of the world's largest enterprises, including Cisco, Japan Post Network, and Symantec. Applications can automatically scale from a few users to millions of page views, as needed.
5) Real-time query optimizer - You need fast access to your data. The Force.com query optimizer delivers under 300ms response time, at a massive scale.
6) Real-time transparent system status - You can always see real-time system performance, availability, and security information at trust.salesforce.com.
7) Real-time upgrades - Unlike traditional software platforms, our upgrades never break your customizations, code, or integrations. We upgrade the platform for you 3 to 4 times each year. As a result, you’re always on the latest version, with access to the latest features, performance, and security enhancements.
8) Real-time sandbox environments - With a single click, you can create copies of your applications, configuration, and data in separate environments for development, testing, and training.
9) Three global production data centers and disaster recovery - Force.com runs on three geographically dispersed, mirrored data centers with built-in replication, disaster recovery, a redundant network backbone, and no single points of failure

Oh my goodness HubSpot Support is just amazing. I submitted a question/issue to them yesterday and by this morning I had this response:

"Hi Stephanie, I hope this finds you well and thanks so much for your patience while I was working to update the extension with my team. We were actually able to push through an update yesterday afternoon which set the default lifecycle stage to lead in the sidebar. If you take a look now, that should be in place. If it has not updated yet, I would recommend uninstalling and re-installing the sales extension so an updated version and be pushed through. Again, I want to say that I sincerely appreciate that you took the time to reach out to us and help us iron this out. HubSpot really values constructive feedback with real use-case backing to help push it along. So, thank you!"

The overall support has been good. More and more features are being released quite frequently. Very small features are also making big difference in how the tool can be adapted and used better. If there is anything we need or are stuck, the support team sets up a call and helps in resolving the issue/provides workarounds.

I attended two training sessions. I would rate them a 4 as an advanced user. It was very basic – great for someone new – would give 8+ for new person.

I had 3 years of experience at the time. I skipped basic and went onto advanced and still not helpful. A lot of it was best practices that didn’t feel relevant for our business

I have gone through multiple. The content that’s delivered is quite basic – I wish they had more advanced training.

We are grandfathered into premium support plus training. We get unlimited access to instructor led and online training for free. We have taken advantage of this

It was not only SUPER easy to implement, we had some amazing support from HubSpot. They scheduled a call to go over each individual tool with our team and provided guidance and best practices plus answered any questions are new users had. It was wonderful and really helped them get started confidently

Just from an organizational standpoint - we standardized our data prior to moving to Salesforce. But we essentially standardized it wrong. That's created a big disgusting mess for us know that I'll have to deal with as the Admin. Be sure you think through use cases prior to doing something like that - seek outside opinions on how the data will work best, especially depending on what else you're going to integrate with Salesforce.

HubSpot Sales Hub helps our team keep track of all of our
partners and customers in one place so we can market effectively and
personally. Their blogs and "HubSpot academy" make it easy to
learn/onboard. People care most about the service, which is the biggest reason
why—such a fan of the pre-made templates, flexibility, and ease of use. The
user interface and integration with other platforms are excellent for our
business. In comparison to its rivals, it would rank at the top so far.

Salesforce Sales cloud is well integrated with a lot of other marketing and sales technology SAAS products that we use within our business, which is a big part of why I enjoy using it. Compared to NetSuite, it is a lot more user friendly, a modern platform that provides better visual understanding of sales pipeline and contains more useful data across the customer journey.

Incentivized

Salesforce is the most widely used CRM system. Professionalism tends to increase when things go wrong for market leaders. Salesforce considers us as users because they own the market. Having all of our data in one place and all of our teams working within Salesforce. Anyone who uses Salesforce is impacted by it, even if they don't.

I don't think there is a limit to Sales Cloud's scalability; at least, I haven't encountered one or heard of one. My data is not enormous, so perhaps some companies might encounter lags, but nothing from my end. I think I'll be able to use Sales Cloud from now until infinity.

Incentivized

Using Salesforce.com has made my daily routines more efficient and simplified the manual tasks I had to perform independently. I can now access data from any device, online or offline, and provide better guidance to my team about the forecasts provided by the built-in artificial intelligence (AI). A chat with a Salesforce support specialist would be great. The knowledge base has a community forum where Salesforce users can ask questions and learn more about the product.

• Lead Response Time:
• Prior to Hubspot, this was maybe 24 hours as an average. Now it is MINUTES. We immediately get back to clients and if we aren't able to then we will connect using email automation and sequences without lifting a finger. It's great!
• Company Growth in difficult times:
• Despite COVID causing issues on Residential Construction in Washington, we have continued to grow as a business, and part of that is thanks to our amazing Sales team, and part of that credit goings to Hubspot directly. If we didn't have Hubspot we would have shrunk or stayed the same as a company. Hubspot made sure we grew.
• ROI [return on investment]
• It's a hard thing to measure but our company has increased its revenue by more than 20% compared to last year. And that is saying a lot for our industry especially with COVID's impact on Residential Construction. I
• can't measure it precisely but I know beyond any shadow of a doubt that HUBSPOT helped make this possible because our Sales and Marketing Teams are sharper and more capable than they have ever been thanks to this wonderful CRM.

• All tools we've implemented with Salesforce had a pretty quick positive ROI with the exception of CPQ & Billing. That was a very large project that I would only suggest for businesses with many SKUs that tend to be packaged together.