HubSpot Looks to Challenge Salesforce with New Features

Credit: HubSpot

HubSpot aims to sustain its strong second-quarter performance by showcasing an array of new features and enhancements at its annual INBOUND event. The CRM platform is adding customer journeys, flexible payment modes, a quote-to-cash functionality, improved data management features, a comprehensive service desk, data quality features, a custom object builder, and more integrations. HubSpot developed these to address concerns regarding businesses’ various points of disconnection.

According to HubSpot CEO Yamini Rangan, a primary source of this disconnection is the cobbled tech stack many businesses use. As various tools fail to deeply integrate with one another, companies face potential disconnection from their peers and clientele. HubSpot seeks to resolve this by expanding its toolset and boosting its business intelligence capabilities. As a result, users can forge deeper ties with other parties, especially within the realms of CRM, sales, and marketing.

With customer journeys, users can map out all the activities and transactions that different types of customers will go through, en route to building stronger connections with them. The new payment modes, on the other hand, allow users to provide custom payment options and integrate these with the platform’s native transaction features. In addition, the platform’s improved analytics and data management solutions afford businesses timely insights while powering automation and automatically spotting data discrepancies and other errors.

Besides its platform’s new features, HubSpot is launching connect.com, a portal that lets the company’s community of users connect with one another. It potentially paves the way for strategic partnerships, collaborations, or even the creation of new ventures. Since everyone’s a HubSpot user, the data exchanges will be seamless.

Competing with Salesforce

HubSpot’s new offerings have seemingly set the company on a collision course with industry leader Salesforce. Its growth path leads the popular CRM platform to somewhat resemble Salesforce in terms of features and price packages. A notable edge Salesforce had—low code infrastructure used for building connectors within the platform and to other software for efficient data exchanges—has been equalized by HubSpot’s upcoming feature update.

When it comes to solutions offered, Salesforce is tough to match, with its comprehensive end-to-end platform and key software acquisitions like Slack and Tableau that integrate with one another. HubSpot is not challenging the industry leader in this regard. However,  the company is vastly improving the connectivity within and among its managed platforms, including the ones for CRM, sales, and marketing. It also affords flexibility in areas like customer mapping, payments, and content tools. Moreover, its LinkedIn-like network adds significant value to the platform.

As far as product pricing is concerned, Salesforce has the more flexible scheme as the cost is relative to the exact number of users and there are four general plans on offer with a 30-day free trial. Meanwhile, HubSpot comes as the slightly more affordable option and offers a generous free plan that includes tools for sales, CRM, marketing, CMS, service, and operations.

Salesforce still carries a slew of clear advantages holistically. But HubSpot is on track to begin chasing the market leader. After all, the company’s growth plan anticipates a staggering revenue increase in the next five years.