HubSpot CRM vs Salesforce Starter: Which is a better fit?

Monica: My name is Monica and I am an administrative and operations manager. Our company consists of 12 people and I would give HubSpot a 4-star rating. We were using Salesforce and the way it was described by my management was as an glorified database. Apparently, we did need support for every step that we needed to follow and support wasn't great, so it just took a lot of work to get simple tasks done. Yeah. I chose HubSpot myself actually. I did some research and I wanted a platform where I could have all of my activities in one place. So not only I have the CRM software, I can also distribute our newsletter and I can also get reports on the activity that I get with my customers and contacts. So initially, I tried it because it was a free platform that offered very sophisticated tools. And I ended up staying with it just because I can have everything in one place, even manage my social media accounts. At first, getting started with HubSpot was very easy. It is very intuitive. It is very well-designed. Later on, I did have some questions. I didn't have the time necessarily to explore the more complex tools, so I did reach out to the sales team. To be honest, it took some time to get an appointment. I got canceled three times so that wasn't great. But the software and the design itself is pretty good where I was able to set it up myself. I would say, if you want to try HubSpot, to watch some videos about all the capabilities. There is even a very short project-oriented course available online. I believe that it's on Coursera. That is very useful. They guide you through every step of the way and they show all the many different free tools that are available which is great because they're not pushing a sale. They are rather just teaching you how to use the software. And yeah, just watch a bunch of videos and do spend some time exploring the many available tools.

Sharilee: Hi, my name is Sharilee and I am the director of a prevention coalition. Everything that we do is about strengthening families and building resilience in youth and helping educate parents about how to be better parents. We give Salesforce a five star rating. We love it. So we actually have used several different software programs and some of them we still use. One particularly we use Trello and it certainly has its benefits, especially when we have with the full team. I've used Trello a lot with the team. The reason that we got into using Salesforce was actually just a recommendation from one of our team members knew someone that used it, and so we met and they told us about it and we decided to give it a try. And there are things about Salesforce that we really love. So we use Salesforce for the things we really love about that, and we continue to use the other programs for the things that we love about them. So one of the things we really love about Salesforce is the task list. And to be honest, that is the main thing that we use it for. I'm sure we are only using a fraction of the capability of the software. There is a pretty steep learning curve with that, or at least a perceived steep learning curve, and we just have not had the bandwidth on our team to be able to really go in and do a lot of the research. But the task list is, it's just phenomenal to be able to, I love how I can basically do just a quick brain dump within the task and have everything right there. If I need to assign something to another team member, I can just assign them. Do the instructions, my assistant and I can pass the tasks back and forth. And so yeah, we really love the task list and that is, again, the main thing. We have set up some of the other parts of it. We haven't used the other parts near as much. We mostly use the task list and it has really been a game changer for us being able to keep track of what we need to be doing day to day. So as I mentioned it's not necessarily an easy... Well, the task list was very easy. That part was really easy to pick up on. Setting up some of the other things was not an easy process, and I assigned my assistant to do that, and she had to do some research and sometimes reach out to her friend that had recommended it. We have set up some of the other processes. We have not utilized them to near the capacity that they provide. Because there is a learning curve and we just have, I mean, we're just very, very busy always and just have not, again, have not had the bandwidth to be able to really get in and figure out the other components of the program and how to set them up. And even just remembering the things that we have done. Then when we go back to we have to change it or whatever, we pretty much have to start from scratch and figure it out again. So it's not an easy program necessarily, but the parts that we have figured out we really love. Again, I really recommend Salesforce for the task list. If that is something that would help you to stay on task, for you to be able to really know what you have. I love the fact that I can wake up every day. I pull up my task list and there it is right there for me. I'm very much a filer, so I have figured out a filing system to where I can just really have things in the order that they need to be done, and I highly recommend it for the task list. Some of the other things that I have seen that are available I think also would be very, very helpful for many of you that are considering the program. They're not necessarily things that we have used at this point, but from what I have seen, Salesforce really can be an all-inclusive program for an organization that takes the time to really figure out how to use all the components.