Before we talk about these two companies, let’s talk about the overall category of client relationship management (CRM) software. The acronym was coined when a CRM was essentially a rolodex on the internet. Now, these CRMs are robust platforms handling marketing, customer tickets, quoting, data, and more. Some refer to it as a Customer Data Platform (CDP), but that’s equally confusing. For our purposes, we’ll stick with CRM.

The CRM industry is 25 years old, yet it is the fastest growing software segment. From 2024 - 2032, the industry is expected to grow at a 14.1% CAGR (source) which will bring it from ~$70 billion in revenue at the start of 2024 to over $200 billion. Why? Among many eye-popping stats, companies with a CRM grow up to 300% faster (source).

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Salesforce currently owns 31% of the CRM market (by revenue - not customer count).

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Hubspot

HubSpot was founded in 2006 by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It introduced an inbound marketing platform that focused on attracting customers through content and measured interactions. HubSpot went public in 2014 and has since expanded its offerings to include CRM, content, and customer service software. By 2023, HubSpot had a market capitalization of $25 billion and served over 113,000 customers in more than 120 countries, solidifying its position as a prominent player in the marketing and sales software industry.

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Key Differences

To outline the many differences between Salesforce and HubSpot is a job for a different blog post. But I will highlight one key point made above - Salesforce has at least 1.15x as many customers as HubSpot. However, Salesforce has 25x as much revenue as HubSpot.

Obviously, the average contract value (ACV) for Salesforce is much higher. Some of this is because Salesforce has more products. In fact, 88% of Fortune 100 companies use at least one Salesforce app. But another driver has been customer size. Salesforce has traditionally worked with large companies that need many, customizations, and integrations with other software. The ability to customize and an ecosystem of integration partners has been the real moat around Salesforce, and its ability to charge more per license.

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So Salesforce is crushing it….do they even see HubSpot as a competitor? Yes. While the revenue of both companies has been “up and to the right,” HubSpot's growth has outpaced that of Salesforce every year since 2019.

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Why? The industry growth has not been at the enterprise-level. It’s been smaller companies who would actually forego the ability to customize their CRM in exchange for one that worked well, quickly. So Salesforce recently rolled out Pro Suite to compete with HubSpot for these smaller companies, and HubSpot has rolled out many features and new products to compete with Salesforce for the larger companies.

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But hang on a minute. You might say, “I’m not a tiny business, but I’m not Fortune 1000, either. Which one is best for me?”

This was the question that Everpeak and many of its clients have asked.

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The answer?  Use both.

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How Everpeak uses both Salesforce and HubSpot

So why do we use both? At a very high level, the answer lies in the founding of both companies. Fundamentally, Salesforce started as a CRM and that product is now called Sales Cloud. HubSpot started as a marketing platform for small and medium sized businesses (SMBs), and that product is now called Marketing Hub.

Everpeak uses other Salesforce and HubSpot products, but CRM and Marketing are the core needs. The core of our tech stack is Sales Cloud (Salesforce) and Marketing Hub (HubSpot), giving us the best of each platform.

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We needed a CRM platform that: 1) easily integrated with Quickbooks and SignNow, 2) allowed for customizing a time-tracking function for employees, 3) had great lead-to-opportunity pipeline management, 4) allowed for customization of the pipeline, 5) had fantastic reporting and analytics.

Salesforce was the winner. Our CRM rocks, and if we want to geek out and build stuff like native project management tools in the future, we can.

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We needed a Marketing platform that: 1) allowed for automated drip campaigns, 2) easily integrated with Apollo, 3) triggered emails off of actions like visiting the website or opening an email, 4) allowed for newsletters (more of a nice-to-have)

For us, HubSpot was the winner. To be clear, Salesforce Marketing Cloud could absolutely do all of this and much, much more. But Everpeak has limited marketing needs - certainly much less than that of many Everpeak clients. We've implemented Salesforce marketing cloud many times for clients, but we required neither the features nor the price tag.

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What’s the downside?

Hypothetically, if a B2B company had the exact same use-cases as Everpeak, are there any downsides to this tech stack? First, there are other solutions to do the same. For instance, Microsoft Dynamics + Marketo. But we feel Salesforce + HubSpot is the best return on investment.

Second, yes, there are some limitations. Using Salesforce Account Engagement (formerly, Pardot) would save some time. But it’s not meaningful. In fact, none of the limitations are meaningful. We’ve never had any issues with data loss, clunky user interfaces or unexpected functionality.

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It just works.

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If you’d like to learn more about the best tools technologies and processes to meet your company’s goals, let’s schedule a 15 min call.