Are you in financial services and debating between Salesforce and HubSpot CRM systems? Our streamlined guide, built on years of experience with Salesforce and HubSpot, outlines the advantages and drawbacks of each platform.
Knowing when and how to scale is a difficult decision for businesses within financial services. When your company is ready for a more sophisticated level of customer tracking, understanding the benefits of and researching how to choose the best customer relationship management system (CRM) becomes vital. Since migrating all your data at a later point in time can often create chaos, it’s imperative to understand the opportunities and challenges of both at the start. At Platinum Cubed, we believe that uncovering the core reasons behind your need for a CRM and defining your goals before implementation is key to success.
By leveraging a powerful CRM like Salesforce, you can meet and exceed your clients’ expectations by gaining deep insights into their business, purchase history, and past issues.
When making your tables to compare CRM systems it’s incredibly important to clarify your why. If your company has good end-to-end processes, clear communication, and excellent data quality then almost any CRM can increase productivity. But if your company is showing the strain of stress in any of those areas, as is typical of fast-growing businesses in financial services, then opting for an expert consultant to guide you through a transition will be invaluable.
With our strategic and focused approach to financial services industries Platinum Cubed has been a trusted partner for banks, insurance companies, brokerage firms, and more, guiding them in implementing Salesforce as the ideal CRM for their operations.
Principle Salesforce Features
- Scale Potential: Extremely High
- Reputation in Financial Sector: Excellent
- One Click Upgrade: Yes
Marketing Cloud
Salesforce Marketing Cloud provides comprehensive automation tools for running email campaigns, social media marketing, comprehensive customer journeys, and advertising campaigns. It supports an extremely fine-tuned ability to personalize at scale.
This bears repeating. Businesses looking to scale are never limited by Salesforce personalization levels. It contains enterprise-grade scalability, an ideal asset for large companies with complex marketing operations.
Salesforce also centralizes profile leads and automated ski banking processes such as loan approvals, compliance tasks, and customer onboarding. Specific tools like Salesforce Chatter and third-party apps also provide laser-like maneuverability for customer retention.
AI-Driven Insights
Agentforce helps marketers analyze customer behavior across platforms, leverage predictive analytics, and suggest the next best actions for engagement. With generative tools, workflow automation, and tailored AI-driven agents built on user data, Agentforce enhances marketing strategies and streamlines customer interactions. Additionally, it offers a wide array of integrations to ensure seamless connectivity with essential business tools.
Comprehensive Sales Reporting
Salesforce provides highly advanced forecasting and sales reporting features with even basic reporting available in the base plans. Detailed reporting on campaign performance, customer engagement, and lead conversion rates presents a 360 view of how your business is functioning, moving forward, and accomplishing its goals. Streamlining loan approvals and compliance tasks are just two examples of how utilizing this CRM can enhance your business.
Integrations
With an extensive marketplace (AppExchange) offering more than 3,200 apps, Salesforce is a robust ecosystem for integrating and meeting needs within the financial services. Specifically, Salesforce has no limitations on integration with credit scoring systems making it a clear winner in this area.
Weaknesses
Salesforce is better suited for companies who implement it with expert direction. It can be challenging to set up, let alone optimize, without a guide or specialized knowledge. Salesforce is a powerful CRM system with extensive capabilities, and fully unlocking its potential takes time and expertise.
Principle HubSpot CRM Features
- Scale Potential: Low
- Reputation in Financial Sector: Medium
- One Click Upgrade: Yes
Inbound Marketing
HubSpot was originally created for marketing and only later added to CRM features. Well their marketing functionality is quite user-friendly and consistent, their customer relationship management system is not. HubSpot has an excellent reputation but not for CRM systems. This is important to consider.
HubSpot is primarily a marketing automation tool with CRM features. It’s better for inbound marketing campaigns. You cannot have duplicate contact records with HubSpot which can cause no end of difficulties even for smaller businesses when they start to scale.
AI Data Insights
HubSpot allows marketers to score leads based on engagement and track them through the sales funnel. It integrates well with a sales team, offering a shared view of customer activity. HubSpot uses Breeze, a generative AI which assists customer facing teams in automating data. While Breeze agents are still in beta mode, the features seem right for advancement.
Analytics and Reporting
Robust analytics offered at HubSpot show how well your marketing efforts are at driving traffic, converting leads, and contributing to sales. The easy to understand dashboards integrate data from email, social media, web traffic, and more.
Furthermore, HubSpot CRM is included at no additional cost, making it a popular starting place for small businesses who aren’t looking to scale.
Integrations
User-friendly and easy to implement, HubSpot integrates seamlessly without needing third-party apps. They even offer a free tier and flexible pricing for different business sizes. With over 100+ apps at their disposal their integrations content library is solid.
Weaknesses
While non-technical individuals can set up HubSpot very quickly because HubSpot has excellent “out of the box” functionality, the ceiling for potential growth is much lower than Salesforce. Salesforce offers a much more simple OTTB experience (database with UI) But it provides the ability to do almost anything via the Custom UI/Custom workflow/ API. This means that Salesforce has an almost unlimited potential for dedicated users but HubSpot does not. Again and again, in our research, we found business owners who used HubSpot to be frustrated when it came time to migrate important data or scale their company.
Conclusion
To keep this guide brief we want to make our recommendation plan. Here at Platinum Cubed, we’ve spent thousands of hours comparing and contrasting HubSpot versus Salesforce in an effort to understand the most important aspects of both systems. In summary, we recommend Salesforce over HubSpot to our partners because the gap in scalability between the two is simply too vast to overlook. Our team of expert consultants knows Salesforce inside and out while understanding how to transform it into a powerhouse for companies within financial services.
At Platinum Cubed, we understand the importance of a seamless user experience for our clients, the value of one-click button upgrades, and how a vast library of app integrations can make a difference as your business navigates the complexities within the financial services industry.
We firmly recommend Salesforce.
Start with a no-hassle, no-cost consultation today.