There are a variety of CRM platforms out there that can help your teams to keep track of and manage your sales pipeline. A couple of these include Pipedrive vs HubSpot – two of the industry leaders in CRM.
Keeping track of your customers and maintaining a strong relationship with them while they are in your sales pipeline is a challenging job. CRMs allow you to automate your interactions with your leads while keeping the content personal to them. In this post, we will be looking at the benefits and challenges of Pipedrive vs HubSpot and the reasons your business should invest in a CRM.
Benefits and Challenges of PipeDrive vs HubSpot
Made in 2010, Pipedrive was created by salespeople to allow users to clearly visualize their contacts, and easily create and manage tasks around ‘activity-based selling’. They have over 50,000 users and use data from them to adapt and improve the platform.
With any platform, there are both benefits and challenges that come from using them.
Benefits
Pipedrive is a popular CRM, being used by influential companies, among the 50,000 mentioned above. The platform is easy to use and built by salespeople for salespeople. They understand the needs of their customers for the platform – and continue to grow with their customer base in mind.
Compared to other CRMs, the pricing is extremely reasonable; $97.84 (when billed annually) for full access to the platform. This makes it more accessible to startup businesses with a smaller budget than others – and performs the majority of tasks that platforms like HubSpot can.
The key part of successful contact management platforms like this is the ability of your teams to visualize where your leads are at certain points of their journey, as well as being able to assign tasks to different team members to contact them at various parts of their journey.
Challenges
Despite being a leader in the CRM sector for sales, Pipedrive is somewhat lacking when it comes to marketing. You can collate all of your leads into one place and use it more as a springboard onto other platforms, or the various other integrations that Pipedrive offers. However, this can create challenges as some integrations can be limited – and you may still need to use different platforms to create your marketing content, which can become complicated.
Benefits and Challenges of HubSpot
HubSpot is also one of the most used CRM platforms out there and has a lot of features that make it popular among its users. Like any marketing and sales platform, HubSpot has a variety of benefits and challenges that come along with using the platform.
Benefits
The main benefit of HubSpot as a CRM platform is its versatility. You can use it for marketing, sales, or both, to operate with synergy. Not only can you view your sales pipeline and clearly segmented lists of all of your contacts, but you can monitor your marketing efforts, too.
Alongside creating email sequences and sales automation, you can create supplemental marketing tools and content to use in your conversations with prospects that will improve not only your relationship with them, but also their likelihood to close a deal with you.
You can build your website using HubSpot for an optimized customer experience, and you can also create additional pages to link to your existing site. The landing page builder can create pages with forms for gated content to either create new leads from paid advertising, or get more information about existing leads and provide them with content that they need to make a more informed decision about what they need from you.
The HubSpot lead scoring tool is an addition to the platform that is vital when it comes to how you automate your sales and marketing. This tool allows you to place your contact list into various groups based on pre-defined criteria, and promote varying content depending on their level or assigned category.
For example, someone with a low lead score will probably benefit from more vague informational content about how your solution will benefit them or general answers to problems within the industry, and for someone with a high lead score (and is close to closing a deal) you want to provide more in-depth and personalized content and emails.
Challenges
The main concerns most have with HubSpot vs Pipedrive are the various pricing levels, the difficulty of knowing what is available within the different levels, and understanding your precise needs. Similarly, with HubSpot being a vast platform, there is a lot on offer which makes it difficult for new users to navigate and learn.
There is HubSpot Academy (a service that Pipedrive also offers), which offers free lessons on how to use their services, as well as certifications that are more in-depth qualifications teaching how to use whole sections of the platform.
Identify Why You Need a CRM
Before you even begin to look at which CRM platform your company would benefit most from utilizing, you need to understand what you want out of the platform, and who in your team would be using it most.
It is integral that your sales and marketing teams work hand in hand to help each other to grow your reach and close deals. If your marketing team already makes use of various platforms to create engaging content, then you may want to focus more on the sales features that CRMs offer, and just use the various integrations available on a variety of platforms.
So the best scenario for your business may not be a Pipedrive vs HubSpot scenario, but utilizing what each of the platforms does best (or your teams are most accustomed to) and plugging the other one in as an integration.
Integration Prospects
The integration of multiple platforms into one another is key to generating a seamless experience not just for your teams, but for your potential customers, also.
An example of this is integrating team communication platforms, such as Slack, into your CRM to host notifications for each new contact, or even create tasks for a colleague straight in the Slack application. Another useful integration is between your CRM and Salesforce. With this integration, you can share contact data between each platform, allowing you to get the most output from your sales pipeline.
Importance of CRMs in B2B Marketing
CRMs such as Pipedrive vs HubSpot have become an integral part of how businesses organize and interact with their prospective customers. They give your teams a clear idea of where each contact is along their journey and allow you to adapt your strategy depending on the journey point.
Once you get a good understanding of how your sales pipeline process works, you can begin to automate it more efficiently based on what works and what doesn’t. The CRM platform you choose will depend on the needs and resources of your company at that time.
At Nituno, we are a HubSpot Certified Partner and have extensive experience and knowledge of both its CRM and CMS services. We work with your teams to come up with viable ways to streamline your sales process and create top-notch marketing content to support your team’s efforts in building fast and strong relationships with your leads, allowing you to close a deal. Get in touch with us today to learn more about how we can help.
