HubSpot has recently launched a free sales CRM. This is just one more CRM option for startups to choose from. There is no excuse for a B2B sales company of more than one person not to have a CRM. We typically have recommended Salesforce.com for our clients in the past, but the new option for HubSpot is intriguing. We now have three clients that are using HubSpot and about 10 clients using Salesforce. There have been a few reviews of HubSpot CRM and even fewer comparing to Salesforce.

These are my thoughts comparing HubSpot and Salesforce’s benefits and intricacies.

HubSpot CRM

This is a great tool for a startup that is moving from not having a CRM to having one. The basic Sales CRM Some of the highlights include:

• Easy to use and very intuitive.
• Includes easy integration with their email tool, Sidekick by tracking opens and provides insights into your inbox.
• There is a great feature where by putting in an email it will add contact details for both individuals and companies. It does not work for all companies or contacts, but many are automatically added.
• The reporting is very basic and would become a challenge for sales leaders if you have many reps.
• If you are looking to move to HubSpot for marketing automation, it is really a no brainer. There is also a program to help startups with a reduced cost for the marketing component.
• There is very little that can be customized.
• If you do look to move on, the export feature does not provide much information for your next CRM.

Salesforce

Salesforce is a powerful CRM that is an excellent choice for companies with a growing sales teams. Some of the highlights include:

• It can be expensive. The group edition is at $25 a month and will work for up to 5 users, the next level is the professional edition at $65 per user a month.
• The reporting and ease of creating custom reports is excellent.
• Salesforce is not intuitive to use and training and best practices will need to be worked on with the team.
• If you plan to leave Salesforce, a lot, but not all of your information can be easily exported.
• For a sales leader Salesforce is much better to help with managing the sales team.
• There are more third party integrations with Salesforce.
• The tool can be customized with new fields easily being added.

I hope this blog has been helpful when trying to decide which CRM is right for your growing business. If you are starting your sales team and need some help on how to prepare, check out this white paper.