HubSpot Sales Hub vs. Salesforce Sales Cloud

HubSpot Sales HUB is well suited for teams who want to run a sales team, grow their business, and continue to do so efficiently. The amazing elements of HubSpot Sales HUB is how the UI facilitates the work to begin with. Beyond the features and capabilities, the UI helps make what you and your team want to accomplish easy. The sales teams who have 2-5 people, teams of 20-50, or 500+, the HubSpot Sales HUB will adapt to how you and your organization are structured.

Obviously, for any business, there are two main areas to focus on — the sales path and the service path. Sales Cloud wouldn’t be suited for a company that’s primarily into support services. For those kinds of companies, Salesforce has a different product — Service Cloud. So, for anyone in the support or service space, Sales Cloud isn’t the right fit.

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

• The customizations - We have an organization that operates differently from most companies, so we’ve had to implement quite a few customizations — and Salesforce allows us to do that quite quickly. Most of the time, delays come from dependencies on other internal parties rather than the system itself.
• From my perspective as a consultant, one of the biggest advantages is that everything is in Salesforce — all the details, all in one place. The ability to customize it easily is a big plus; there’s really a lot you can do with it.

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

• We still need to include the production part. We started using Salesforce to sell the seeds — our inventory is in SAP — and from there we handle sales and track the process of planting, harvesting, selling, and then collecting payments. But we don’t yet manage the earlier production processes, like production planning. We handle allocation, but not full production planning, and that’s an area where we still have room for improvement.

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

Because I think it could be easier. We have different standards today since we’re used to interacting with consumer apps like Starbucks, where all you do is scan your card. Then, when you use Sales Cloud, there are still a lot of manual inputs. So my mission with AI is really about figuring out how to make that easier.

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.

To be honest, there are great features in all of these competitors but they aren't quite as user-friendly or robust compared to Hubspot. Hubspot's Sales hub was able to add more features to it's platform while remaining very user-friendly and easy to use. I found myself getting lost navigating platforms like Zendesk or Salesforce, there is also a much nicer onboarding experience with Hubspot.

So I've evaluated, implemented Microsoft Dynamics in the past. I've used Oracle CRM solutions. I've used Daylight, which is a very niche CRM system the last couple of years. And I've evaluated a variety from Legacy Microsoft Ones to Zoho and Sugar when making implementation decisions at other companies. But usually I've gone with Salesforce. I'd say it's better than most. The only one that I generally prefer, and last time I chose an implementation from scratch, I did Microsoft Dynamics. And the reason is for small mid-size organization, Microsoft Dynamics, if you already have Microsoft Office products, it's much better integrated to all of the Excel, Word, OneNote, Outlook email than what you get from Salesforce. And so that's the only one that if someone's a Microsoft organization and small sized company, it'll save a lot of integration things, a lot of security, a lot of login and access and IT management by just sticking within the Microsoft ecosystem. But outside of that, if you don't use Microsoft or if you're a large organization or have other needs that you want, Salesforce I'd say is better than all of the other CRM offerings out there. It's the easiest to use and the most robust and the most vendors and products for the ecosystem.

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.

It's very scalable as it has a ton of features (but you do need an admin who understands how to leverage these features). Because of the various features, we've also needed to host onboarding sessions with our users so that they can familiarize themselves with the platform, which isn't always super user-friendly or intuitive.

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.

• It is easy for the sales team to track how well the dealers in their region are selling products.
• It is easy to generate reports and see how well sales are each month compared to past months.
• Quicker time to get products shipped to customers.

Incentivized