How to Know When it's Time to Cut Ties

Four Tell Tale Signs that HubSpot is Falling Short for Your Organization’s Current and Future Needs

HubSpot Is Marketing Automation at Its Core, Not A Complete CRM

At its heart, HubSpot has always been a marketing automation platform designed as an email engine. CRM in HubSpot is just an add-on, and they’ll give it away to you free. You may have started with marketing automation, but then you realized you can’t:

In other words, it’s not full-scale sales and service automation.

Track sales funnels and pipelines
Manage quotas and selling stages

Run forecasts
Get a complete view of customer activity across stakeholders

One of the best CRMs out there… It has a very crisp and beautiful UI, which perfectly fits the product and doesn't have a lot of learning attached to it.

Eti B., Cimplyfive, G2 Review Comment

Why Sophia University Needed a Central CRM/MAP Hub
Ashley Simon, Sr. Admissions Counselor at Sofia University

HubSpot Is a Flat,
Contact-based Application

Any contact-based CRM app should give you pause. Unlike account-based apps like Sugar, you’re creating duplicates of accounts if you need to add new contacts at a company.

Five contacts at one company?
That’s five accounts. That makes it difficult to gain a 360-degree view of each customer, and bubble up all account activity to a single view from multiple sources. HubSpot doesn’t copy core information like address, title, and account information. New contacts all have to be re-keyed at the contact level.

Need to build a list or marketing segment?

Data isn’t pulled from one source of truth but multiple sources, and you’ll be unable to track account-to-account relationships, such as account connections for referrals or bid work.

You can’t have many-to-many relationships without creating new account data. If you can’t see every person related to every account they’re involved with, your teams will waste precious time moving through a sales cycle.

The Clunkiness and Disconnect of Hubspot’s CRM
Dennis Smith, VP of Sales at SugarCRM

You’ve Outgrown HubSpot,
and Now You Need to Scale

You may have noticed you’ve quickly outgrown HubSpot

Insufficient Functionality

Adding accounts and relationships is cumbersome
Integrating with core ERP is clumsy
Out-of-the-box reports are nowhere near as functional as your real-world use cases without adding new data

Scalability

HubSpot is a flat architecture, and can only support simple use cases from within an instance. You can’t easily scale:

Your hierarchy of accounts
Role-based views
Time-aware dashboards
Team security
Pipeline tracking
And other critical use cases

Rigid Infrastructure

HubSpot will put you in rigid lanes from day one. You won’t be able to create relationships between modules, and you can’t change the way the structure of the database works.

If you try to patch things together contact by contact, you’re reporting will fall apart, and canned reports aren’t useful without custom layouts to the design.

With Sugar, you can easily adapt, and configure CRM to meet your changing business needs.

The Simplicity of
One Tab to Success

Now consider the user experience.

To see customer data in HubSpot, you’ll need to up a series of new windows, one after another, just to get a clear view of contacts, accounts, and relationships. Imagine fifty open windows on your desktop. Not fun.

Sugar gives you “One Tab to Success.”

Anywhere you can see data, you can work with that data. Work right inside a report without having to navigate different modules, and run your whole business from a dashboard. Configure dashboards any way you want (easily and without complicated customizations). Surface any information you want, such as:

Changing stages of an opportunity
Where an opportunity might be stuck
Who’s involved in a particular deal
Or a big-picture view of how your teams are performing

Sugar is extremely adaptable, allowing us to establish any mix of process automation, which has proved critical in allowing us to undertake so many time-saving improvements to how employees function.

G2 Review Comment