HubSpot and Salesforce: Rivals or Partners?

Marketing agencies typically identify with a single customer relationship management (CRM) platform. They consider themselves a “HubSpot Agency” or a “Salesforce Agency” and tout their mastery of their preferred CRM to prospects, clients and partners.

There are many articles that compare HubSpot and Salesforce—two of the most popular CRMs in the industry—based upon their pricing, features and client support. While that type of comparison information is extremely valuable, we wanted to change the conversation a bit.

In this blog, we’re discussing the CRM strengths of each platform, what their integration looks like and what your long-term CRM strategy may look like.

HubSpot: For Small-to-Mid-Sized Businesses 

HubSpot’s CRM is famously easy to implement. Its intuitive, user-friendly interface and free basic plan makes getting started with HubSpot convenient for sales departments and agencies, alike.

Some companies will never need to move past the basic platform of HubSpot, but others will need to upgrade as their contact list grows in size. With HubSpot’s free version, companies can maintain up to 1,000,000 contacts, users and storage without any expiration date.

It provides sales and marketers with convenient features like automating and tracking interactions between sales and prospects; providing real-time visibility into your pipeline; syncing with Gmail or Outlook; and seeing everything about a lead in one single place. With the ability to sort contacts by date, name, company, job title and so much more, HubSpot makes contact management simple and streamlined, making it an ideal choice for startup to enterprise companies that don’t have too much complexity surrounding their sales cycle.

Salesforce: For Enterprises 

Salesforce’s lead-management features and accommodation of multiple, complex sales pipelines make it ideal for enterprise companies with sales teams focusing on multiple deals at once. Salesforce provides extensive reporting capabilities that allow companies to access the in-depth insights they need when a large array of deals are being conducted across disparate geographies, industries, price points and more.

One of the most notable features of Salesforce is its “big data” abilities. According to Salesforce, 76 percent of businesses lack the understanding of the potential value of their information. That’s where Salesforce is changing the game. Salesforce provides comprehensive reporting features that can break down complex data, and make it usable to sales teams. It also makes sure that all data and reports are available to everyone on the team in real-time, no matter where they are in the world. Beyond that, Salesforce also has robust security features that ensures data is kept secure and confidential.

For enterprises that need the comprehensive capabilities of Salesforce, but also require a marketing platform, Salesforce and HubSpot have an increasingly popular integration, which leads us to our next point.

The HubSpot + Salesforce Integration 

While the prevailing narrative focuses on HubSpot and Salesforce being rivals, or, at least, two options in a binary decision, we’re challenging that notion. In addition to its CRM, HubSpot has additional flagship products, including its Marketing Hub. The Marketing Hub is the company’s inbound marketing, sales and service software component that helps companies organize, publish, monitor and optimize their marketing activity. Enterprises, that are confined to the just-CRM capabilities of Saleforce, find themselves needing a Marketing Hub of their own, which has lead to the integration of HubSpot and Salesforce.

Here’s what the HubSpot + Salesforce integration can do for you:

• Integrate new records and important contact details from Salesforce to HubSpot and vice versa
• Automatically send lead intelligence like form submissions and email opens to Salesforce
• Allow your sales team to share revenue data back to HubSpot as they close leads in Salesforce
• Share campaign and response data between Salesforce and HubSpot, eliminating time wasted importing and exporting
• Share lead scoring between the two platforms, giving you access to Salesforce’s automatic lead scoring

To integrate HubSpot and Salesforce and get your marketing and sales teams working synergistically, here’s what you need:

• A HubSpot Marketing/Sales/Service Hub Professional or Enterprise account
• A Salesforce edition with API access or a Salesforce Professional account
• The appropriate administrative permissions on each CRM¹

Your CRM Strategy

Choosing a CRM is a big decision for a company of any size, and historically, assessing a CRM for its lead management capabilities was the only factor to consider. Now, with the onset of HubSpot’s expansive Marketing Hub capabilities, companies are challenged with determining not only their contact management needs, but their marketing management needs as well.

For the most part, enterprises that require robust and comprehensive CRM capabilities are turning to Salesforce and utilizing the HubSpot integration, while startup-to-SMBs are getting everything they need and more from HubSpot’s all-in-one sales and marketing solution. At the end of the day, the CRM you choose is all about your specific needs and ROI, so be sure to choose wisely by considering: the size of your contact list; the complexity of its management needs; your plan for marketing management; and finally, how you will ensure sales and marketing alignment.

Sources:

1. Salesforce Integration, HubSpot
2. 5 Limitations of the HubSpot and Salesforce Integration, Stacy Bouchard