When to switch from HubSpot to Salesforce
The SaaS CFO has just published his fourth annual CFO tech stack survey.
Ben Murray surveyed 393 participants, across a broad range of ARR levels and employee numbers.
I recommend downloading the full report in which he covers:
Core accounting
Payment processing
Forecasting and Budgeting
BI/Analytics
Payroll
Contract Management
and many other segments.
CRM is dominated by HubSpot and Salesforce
In the report, no other category has such clear leadership by two companies.
Between HubSpot and Salesforce they own 83% of the market.
Pick one of these two and you can be sure you are with one of the market leaders.
But which is right for your business today?
What size of companies use HubSpot?
The data becomes more interesting when you break down the usage by ARR value.
HubSpot has been known for its ease of use in the SMB market where companies have less internal resource and want to use more standardised SaaS tools in place of complex configuration and customisation.
HubSpot (in orange) dominates the Seed stage companies up to an ARR of around $4m.
But during the Series A phase at $3m-10m ARR Salesforce starts to dominate the market, and past Series B funding at $11m ARR Salesforce has more than three times the market share of HubSpot.
(I use the benchmarks of Series A at $3m ARR and Series B at $10m ARR)
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Why do companies switch from HubSpot to Salesforce?
Companies get more complex as they scale. They launch new products, they hire more people and they may launch in new countries. All these changes introduce more complexity, and requests for customisation that push the limits of HubSpot.
The data shows that during the Series A phase, from $3m to $10m ARR companies are switching out from HubSpot to Salesforce.
(The data only shows that at $10m ARR more companies have Salesforce, but a company at $10m ARR used to be a company with $3m ARR so we can infer it was previously in a HubSpot dominated segment)
Why are companies making that switch?
In the Series A Founder’s Guide to Revenue Operations I showed that at $3m ARR the Go To Market team consists of single teams of marketers, sellers and CSMs.
These are relatively easy to manage in HubSpot.
But by $10m ARR that team has exploded to multiple teams with over 40 sellers, 15 marketers and 10 CSMs
If we look just at the sales team, these five teams might include:
1 x SDR team
1 x SMB AE team
1 x Mid-market AE team
1 x Enterprise AE team
1 x Account Management/Renewal team
These teams will have alignment to the same accounts (one account will have an SDR, a new business AE and an AM aligned to it), and this complexity pushes what is possible with the more SMB focused HubSpot.
When to plan your switch from HubSpot to Salesforce
HubSpot is continually developing new Enterprise features as they focus on keeping their larger customers for longer.
As this survey continues over coming years I would expect to see companies switching later and later.
Their marketing directly addresses the decision companies are making - balancing the ease of use of HubSpot with the customisation of Salesforce.
However, if you are scaling a GTM team up beyond $10m ARR you will want to imagine a world where your org structure, geographical teams and sales processes have become more complex.
Instead of just thinking one step ahead of where you are today and whether you can stretch your current systems, determine what your business will look like four steps ahead, and if the chart above showing Salesforce’s dominance in the upper segments is a sign of your future destination.
Plan early so that you have time to make any change at your pace, and technology is not holding you back from making hiring or strategic decisions.
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