While there are numerous CRM systems on the market, not many are equipped to meet the needs of large enterprises. Among the serious contenders, MS Dynamics, HubSpot, and Salesforce stand out thanks to their robust features and unique capabilities. Here’s how they stack up.
Pros and Cons of HubSpot CRM
Hubspot offers four “hubs” — Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, and CMS Hub to help users generate leads, accelerate sales, simplify processes, and build a powerful website experience. The CRM platform is a lightweight and feature-rich component of the Sales Hub.
Pros
Thanks to the seamless integration with the other “Hubs,” you can manage every aspect of customer engagement — sales, marketing, and service — all in one place. Since all the customer data is on the same platform, you can easily combine the information to eliminate silos and deliver a seamless customer experience.
HubSpot CRM is very user-friendly, with a high adoption record among salespeople, marketers, and customer service management teams. Although its reporting capabilities aren’t the most robust, they can be easily leveraged to inform decision-making.
HubSpot CRM is free and the cost of additional features from Sales Hubs is lower than many of its competitors. HubSpot offers outstanding round-the-clock customer support in addition to an extensive partner network.
Cons
While HubSpot pulls together many functions under one roof, it still lags behind Salesforce in terms of uber-granular customization if you have several different or unique business processes. Also, the free version reporting feature doesn’t offer as much depth as Salesforce and MS Dynamics.
Although it has a wide range of features, HubSpot CRM doesn’t offer a high level of customization for standard objectives such as contacts. Therefore, it’s less ideal for highly specialized use cases such as healthcare, finances, and higher education.
Pros and Cons of Salesforce
Salesforce is an all-in-one pipeline and customer relationships management platform that unites marketing, sales, commerce, service, and IT. Pardot, Salesforce’s B2B marketing automation solution, is particularly popular among large enterprises.
Pros
Salesforce offers the most options for third-party integrations, making it easy to keep using many of your existing tools without having to manually transfer customer data between platforms. It has the most powerful and robust reporting features and data visualization capabilities that allow for the most granular reporting.
The platform has numerous customization capabilities, including standard objects such as contact and leads, so it’s more adaptable to industry-specific requirements. Salesforce is also popular among large sales and marketing organizations thanks to its user management abilities. For example, you can oversee user permission at both the individual and team level, as well as set role-based permissions.
Cons
The platform is slow to load. The implementation is a costly and time-consuming process due to the high level of customization involved. The interface is not intuitive and advanced certifications are required to manage the platform effectively.
Salesforce’s customer support system is ticket-based. You’ll need to pay extra for a support package if you want 24/7 phone support and guaranteed response time. Also, it’s the most expensive option among the three contenders.
Pros and Cons of MS Dynamics
Dynamics 365 is a cloud-based collaboration platform that brings together sales, marketing, customer insights, customer service, field service, remote assistant, supply chain management, finance, commerce, fraud protection, and more.
Pros
Thanks to the seamless integration with other Microsoft 365 products, Dynamics offers an all-in-one single-platform solution. If your employees are already familiar with the user interface of other Microsoft applications, Dynamics is relatively easy to adopt.
Dynamics 365 offers many functions designed specifically for field agents and project management professionals, which aren’t available on most other platforms. In addition, it has robust business intelligence (BI) features, including AI-powered analytics that can help you process a large amount of customer data and extract insights.
Microsoft Dynamics is also available in an on-premise version. It can be used by businesses with specific security needs that prevent them from storing customer data in the cloud.
Cons
Dynamics is more complex in terms of implementation and administration. While the basic version costs less than Salesforce, many features (including 24/7 support) are paid add-ons so the price can add up quickly.
The platform was initially designed for on-premise use so it’s still playing catch-up on some cloud functionalities. Besides, you’ll need specially-trained administrators to implement the tool.
Which CRM Platform is Best for Your Business?
All three CRM platforms are top of the line and the best choice depends on your unique business requirements, organizational structure, IT roadmap, budget, and more.
HubSpot is highly scalable and supports multi-team alignment, with over 10K integrations and touts binding several teams and processes in-house. Salesforce is best for supporting a large sales and marketing team needing specialization of process and large customization.
Meanwhile, Dynamics 365 works well with other Microsoft products and meets industry-specific needs such as field service support. A Microsoft Partner can help you integrate the application effectively with your other Microsoft tools to optimize productivity.
