Aren’t Salesforce and HubSpot competitors? Why would you use both?
When building their tech stack, businesses often think they have to choose between HubSpot and Salesforce. Despite being competitors, a growing number of companies are actually leveraging both platforms together. Here’s why this trend is gaining traction and why it might make sense for your business.
The Strengths of Salesforce
Salesforce is a highly customizable CRM that becomes deeply integrated into a company’s operations. Once it’s set up, switching away from Salesforce is challenging and costly due to its extensive customization and broad adoption across various departments. This makes Salesforce a long-term solution for many businesses, providing robust tools for managing sales processes and customer data.
The Strengths of HubSpot
On the other hand, HubSpot excels in marketing automation. Its Marketing Hub is known for being user-friendly and feature-rich, which makes it a favorite among marketing teams. Unlike Salesforce’s Pardot or Marketing Cloud, HubSpot is intuitive and integrates smoothly with Salesforce, offering an excellent solution for marketing needs. HubSpot simplifies capturing and nurturing leads, which is essential for effective marketing.
Integration Benefits
By integrating HubSpot with Salesforce, businesses can capitalize on the strengths of both platforms. This integration allows for seamless data flow between marketing and sales teams. HubSpot can handle marketing automation, capturing leads, and tracking engagement, while Salesforce manages sales pipelines and customer relationships.
This collaboration ensures that sales teams have access to valuable marketing insights, such as lead behavior and engagement history, directly within Salesforce. It aligns marketing and sales efforts, leading to improved coordination and better overall performance.
Challenges of Integration
However, integrating these two systems requires careful planning and maintenance. Common challenges include ensuring data consistency, accurately mapping fields, and managing sync errors. It’s crucial to have a clear integration strategy to avoid issues like data silos and duplicate records.
To mitigate these challenges:
• Maintain Data Hygiene: Clean up your data before integration to prevent issues from spreading across both systems.
• Regular Monitoring: Continuously monitor the integration to identify and resolve sync errors promptly.
• Customize Field Mapping: Tailor field mappings to your business needs to ensure accurate data transfer.
• Utilize Automation: Implement automation tools to streamline data flow and reduce manual tasks.
Using Both Tools
Using both HubSpot and Salesforce together can provide a comprehensive solution that leverages the strengths of each platform. Salesforce offers powerful sales management, while HubSpot delivers top-tier marketing automation. Although integrating the two can be complex, the benefits often outweigh the challenges, leading to enhanced efficiency and better business outcomes. If you already use Salesforce, consider adding HubSpot to your tech stack to maximize your CRM capabilities.
