HubSpot vs. Salesforce Comparison: Choosing the Right CRM System

CRM or the customer relationship management solution is a must-have for every organization. It helps to maintain the relationship with the customer by integrating the business activities, the process, and related technology revolving around the customer. The solution thus helps to enhance the sales and customer service process.

 As we know, with every interaction, customers leave behind a trail of information. 

Your CRM system stores this information and allows you to out the data to use.

This information further helps the representatives to gain the right insights, so that they can accordingly curate their sales pitch or provide the right aid to every customer.

The useful feature is increasing the demand for CRM. As per a report, there has been a huge growth in the CRM market in recent years and is predicted to cross US $ 80 billion by the year 2025.

How does CRM help in seamless interaction?

The information or the data, which is both in structured and unstructured form, are gathered and stored at a single place for further reference by the representatives. Every customer has their preferences, requirements, or liking; so as a customer service representative, when you have this information, you can have a seamless interaction with them. It thushelps to generate better business results and success for the organization.

Your CRM aligns with your business requirements.

There are many CRM solutions available in the market; the two popular ones are HubSpot and Salesforce. Both of them provide unique solutions and have varied features, but the pricing structure is different as per their various plans.

These solutions help various organizations such as SMBs and large enterprises to achieve their goals at the right time, but the challenge is to choose the right one as per the budget and the needs of the company.

Below, you could find detailed information about both CRMs. Later, the key takeaways would guide you to the right one as per your business process.

HubSpot

HubSpot was mainly designed for inbound marketing. The HubSpot model is as follows:

It shows how HubSpot CRM helps all the departments the right way.

The inbound marketing process, which helps the organizations to attract the right number of visitors, to the website, for converting them as customers is a popular tactic among the marketers. In this process, marketers have the freedom to implement various methods on different channels to increase the number of conversions and revenue.

The solution offers the right software for all the departments, such as customer service, sales, and marketing. Some of the additional features of the solution are marketing automation, lead generation, and analytics. The benefits of the HubSpot CRM are it easily integrates with the ongoing sales process, it can be linked to all the locations of the sales process, including social media profiles, websites, phone calls, email service providers, and other locations. The solution has an intuitive interface and is flexible.

Every time a visitor visits your website, the information is collected and landed into the database of HubSpot. 

The solution gives you uninterrupted 24/7 support via phone and is also available on live chat. As an organization, you would like your challenges to be quickly addressed; this standout feature of HubSpot helps you in the same.

HubSpot CRM plan is affordable. It has different plans. The starter plan is $50 per month, the enterprise plan is $1200-$3200, while the professional plan is available is $400-$800.

You can even use its 14 day free trial period, before going for any of the plans.

Some of the top companies that use HubSpot CRM are Mollie, Accenture, Kingsmen software, Trello.

How HubSpot CRM helps eCommerce businesses?

The retail e-commerce business would spike up to 735 billion US dollars by 2023.

As per a report, in the second quarter of 2019, eCommerce peaked to 146.2 billion USD. The US consumers purchased different items as per their requirements.

HubSpot has a useful WooCommerce feature that could help eCommerce businesses to generate the best sales.

The 4 crucial features of WooCommerce are:

• Deep data integration
• HubSpot optimized for eCommerce
• Growth tools
• Data into the reports and then reports into action

It is also believed HubSpot’s WooCommerce integration feature could be one of the best e-commerce automation tools in the year 2020 and turn around huge success for many organizations.

And, how would it execute?

Marketers follow many procedures and strategies to win a new customer, delight the existing one, and wake up the dormant ones. The features in this solution can convert the abandoned cart into sales, automate the marketing process, record the conversions with ROI tracking, automate the emails with email marketing process, increase the online sales, etc.

The deep data integration feature of WooCommerce helps to keep the data at a single place. Let’s check for more information:

• Customers: The feature helps in the automated alignment of the customer’s data in the HubSpot for easier access.

• Products: It helps to compare different products that are giving more sales. Thus marketing teams can develop the right campaign to increase the traffic, improve engagement level, and increase sales.

• Events: The purchase history and conversation with the customer helps to give the required information that you cannot collect from anywhere else.

• Orders: From the orders, you can analyze different behavior and purchase style of the customer buying a product.

The growth tool feature of WooCommerce helps to engage with customers and expand the possibilities of conversion. The detailed explanation:

• Restore the abandoned carts: Most of the customers add the items in the cart and halfway abandon the cart. This growth tool feature helps to recover the abandoned cart.

• The generation of coupon code: As an organization, one must have experienced that coupon code helps to increase sales. The auto-generation of the single use coupon code with this feature helps the process. The code can be sent to the existing as well as potential customers.

The HubSpot optimized for e-commerce feature helps to generate more revenue for the organization. Find below:

• Workflows with the right automation: With the help of this feature, one can personalize the workflow along with the right customization and visualization.  This helps your business to be always connected with the customer.
• Segmentation of RFM: Recency, frequency, and the monetary value is what defines the term. One can create various customer segments with the help of RFM analysis. The analysis can help in understanding the performance of the customer.
• Lists that are intelligent: Intelligent lists are the one feature that helps to group the customers based on their demographics, fashion buying behavior, and their personas. This helps to target the audience rightly.

The reports into action feature helps to convert insights into action:

• Understand your customers: With the help of this feature, you can understand who are your customers to plan the inbound email campaign. The campaign helps to bring one of the best sales for your marketing approach.
• Email marketing: Email marketing is known to be one of the effective approaches for marketing.  The feature helps the marketer to achieve the right results from email marketing; by gaining the understanding from insights and converting into action.

Salesforce

 

Salesforce is one of the best customized CRM solutions for your business. It is also referred to as the customer success platform. One of the best features of the solution is, you can have a unified customer view. Its major features are contact management, quote management, opportunity management, customer engagement tools, workflow creation, collaboration tools, etc. The solution is great in understanding what has been done and what is pending to drive the process. Salesforce CRM helps to store the information at a common place. As a result, a representative can refer to this information, while conversing with the customer. The availability of the app such as customer relationship management helps the executive to keep a complete track record of their activities.

The guide to the right information at the right time makes the task easier for the employee. They can easily prioritize the leads and reach out to them at the right time.

Some of the top US companies that use Salesforce are American Express, and ADP. These are the multinational companies that need customized CRM solutions for their process. Salesforce CRM is the right choice for them. The comprehensive solution is rightly designed to meet the varied needs of the giant companies.

Salesforce has a 14-day free trial period. This is enough to test whether the solution could meet your requirements as per the allocated budget.  You should better test the solution before purchasing, as the customized needs could cost around $150 per user per month.

How Salesforce CRM helps eCommerce businesses?

The features of the Salesforce CRM helps the e-commerce business to achieve their objectives.

The eCommerce integration feature combines the order management, AI-powered personalization, digital commerce, and store operations into a single platform. Let’s find in detail:

• AI-personalized experience: It offers the AI-personalized shopping experience from any device, thus making the customer satisfied. Making the customer happy means you are able to retain them. What else one needs in the competitive business world? 

• Maximizes productivity: It helps to maximize productivity as the feature automates the tasks. One can even visualize the customer activity at every touchpoint, also enables the online ordering of the parts for replacement. 

• Right stocking of products: The feature helps in the right stocking of the products that the customer needs. It thus removes the cluttering of unnecessary products creating confusion among customers and sellers.

• Solving the complexity of business: It solves the complex online buying process in an organization. The process includes the fast reordering process, custom catalogs, contract pricing, etc.

• Simplifies and makes it easy for the customer: As consumers can enjoy shopping from anywhere and from any device, it makes online shopping convenient for the customer. 

• Driving revenue with insights: With ample customer information, one can derive the right insights from the same to drive the right revenue for the organization. Insight is the guide to the marketing approach that needs to be followed by every marketer, and can help the e-commerce business in the long-run. The solution provides a 360-degree view to all the activities of the customer and help the organization in planning inventory, orders, etc.

So, the key takeaways, which is the best CRM for your business?

Well, if you have a budget constraint, Salesforce would not be the right choice for you. Although the solution has many features that would be beneficial for your business,it is little expensive than HubSpot. The HubSpot CRM has been found suitable for the small and mid-sized enterprises for its competitive prices. 

Salesforce is found ideal for enterprises that need superbly developed customized solutions for their robust needs.The customized solution of Salesforce provides adequate support to big organizations than the HubSpot CRM, and meets the exact needs of a large team in a large organization. The varied features are also useful for the various needs of these organizations.

Both the CRM offers a 14-day free trial, a good thing for you. It gives you a chance to try both so that you can choose the right one for your business.

If you are an e-commerce business, and willing to invest more for quality services, then Salesforce CRM could be a better option as it provides excellent customer experience at every touchpoint, and can help you to convert more sales with an effective set-up.

Conclusion:

While it is tempting to purchase a CRM that is highly customized, but remember it could be expensive, and you might not use all the features of the same. So, it would be a sheer waste of investment. 

Make the wise decision and choose CRM that perfectly fulfills your business requirements, and if you are an organization that has massive and complex needs, go for the highly customized solution. It could bring you good revenue as per your investment.

Choosing the right CRM is choosing the future to great customer satisfaction, sales, and revenue, so never falter in this approach. Do your own research, understand the exact requirements of your organization, execute trial and error, then acquire the right solution for your organization.

Author Bio

Robert Jordan, a seasoned marketing professional with over 10 years of experience, currently working as Media Relations Manager at InfoClutch Inc, which provides technology database including Hospitals email list & many more technologies for your marketing campaign. Have expertise in setting up the lead flow for budding startups and takes it to the next level. Have a deep interest in SEO, SEM & Social Media related discussions. His passion is writing. Currently he provides nursing paper help for students.