Your customers are the lifeblood of your business.
That means that the relationships you build with your customers are at the heart of what you do. Your marketing and sales teams need to understand your customers and prospects to build relationships. Enter CRM (customer relationship management) software.
When looking for a tool that maximizes customer satisfaction and lifetime value and drives more sales, look no further than a CRM. A robust CRM system allows you to make data-driven decisions and build a growth marketing, sales, and support pipeline.
Both CRM providers highlighted in this post are popular options for growing businesses. But which one is the best? This post will help you decide which CRM is best for your business.
HubSpot vs. Netsuite CRM Comparison: What to Look For
A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system is a tool that aligns your marketing, sales, service, and operations teams. Your entire team can use it to create meaningful relationships with your prospects and customers.
The more robust and comprehensive your CRM is, the better. If your business is using multiple tools to manage contacts, connect with leads, and build reports manually, you’re not alone. But there is another way.
A great CRM collects, stores, organizes, and manages your contacts to track the buyer’s journey for every person you interact with, so you can run effective marketing campaigns that delight and help retain your customers.
Without a CRM, your sales team can’t align with your marketing efforts. Sales leads get lost or forgotten, and customer profiles are challenging to build with incomplete or inaccurate data. With a lack of collaboration between marketing and sales, customers are pushed between different departments, often repeating themselves because no one knows their history.
Customer service suffers because your customer service reps are putting out fires instead of proactively working with customers to resolve issues.
Now you know the benefits of a CRM and the pitfalls of scraping by without one, let’s look at two powerhouses and see which is the right fit for your business.
How do we Compare HubSpot to Netsuite CRM?
We’ll include the following criteria when comparing HubSpot and Netsuite CRM so you have a complete picture, allowing you to make the right decision.
- Best for
- Price
- Scope to scale/grow
- Features
- Pros and cons
- Support
- Customer reviews
What is Netsuite CRM?
Netsuite is a cloud-based business management platform with a suite of applications that help small to mid-sized companies run, understand, and drive revenue in their business.
They promise to generate a single view of your prospects, customers, partners, and vendors and give sales, marketing, and support teams real-time data to deliver exceptional customer experiences and drive sales.
A single view of customer data helps inform marketing decisions, and the analytics functionality integrates metrics and data to provide management with a complete view of their organization.
Best for: Companies who want to manage their day-to-day operations and customer relationships.
Pros and Cons of Netsuite CRM
Pros
Netsuite provides a centralized data source on customers, products, pricing, discounts, taxes, and more to increase efficiency and collaboration. You’ll also have access to leads, prospects, and customers to better inform marketing and sales.
With the Salesforce integration, you can equip sales with real-time access to prospects, customers, opportunities, and order records. Sales forecasting also helps to build reliability and trust in the sales process.
Real-time dashboards make reporting and analysis more accessible, and you’ll have comprehensive insights to inform all your teams and maximize revenue. To add to this, you can automate marketing campaigns to align with sales efforts.
Finally, mobile access to real-time business information means you never miss a beat.
Cons
NetSuite has all the bells and whistles, but that makes it expensive. What if you don’t need all those features? The bulky feature set also slows down the system, and with so many features, the learning curve requires some time.
From customer reviews, although customer reports are highly-detailed, it can be challenging to create those reports.
From other reviews, it’s not user-friendly, and there isn’t much support throughout the implementation process. It’s also apparent that there’s no free trial, which doesn’t allow for trying the system to see if it’s the right fit.
The price is steep, and there are additional costs for training, customer service, and other options. Though it’s pricey, that doesn’t mean it’s too expensive for every business. It depends on how you want to customize the system and how big your organization is.
What is HubSpot?
HubSpot is a cloud-based CRM designed to help align sales and marketing teams, foster sales enablement, and optimize your inbound marketing strategy to generate qualified leads.
In plain English?
It’s a platform designed to help your company attract your ideal customers, engage meaningfully with them, and delight them once they become a customer.
A single source of truth, HubSpot promises that you can deliver the ultimate customer experience from one place. You can unify marketing, sales, customer service, and support with five different hubs.
Best for: Companies looking for a customizable CRM that can scale as they grow.
Pros and Cons of HubSpot
Pros
With HubSpot, you can manage growth and scale with access to all the tools you need in one place. Marketing automation software manages the customer journey from attracting your target customers to converting them through robust segmentation and powerful email marketing. It also provides an easy way to analyze and report on your efforts.
The tools you need are called a ‘Growth Suite,’ which groups your marketing, sales, and customer service hubs. These tools make it easy to pass a contact from marketing to sales without having to sync information, and you can create reports to look at your customers across their entire buyer’s journey.
The HubSpot Academy has dozens of courses and certifications to help you learn how to use each element of the platform.
A huge plus is that HubSpot has a ‘free forever’ subscription for small businesses, which allows anyone to get free access to the portal and get a feel for how things work. You can scale up from that point. Free, Starter, Professional, and Enterprise packages offer various levels of access and functionality.
Cons
While HubSpot’s flexible pricing model is a positive, it won’t be the cheapest option. And the free version is elementary. The starter package doesn’t include workflow automation and custom reporting, functionalities that set HubSpot apart.
You’ll have to plan for the future and research what you’ll invest in HubSpot now, what it might cost you in the future, and what else is out there. For example, the more leads you get, the more you’ll have to pay to market to them.
Although HubSpot is built to be user-friendly and easy to learn, some businesses might want to have a more customizable CRM to capture more data. Adding customizable options does tend to make CRMs more clunky, however, so many businesses may appreciate HubSpot’s more streamlined nature.
We mentioned that getting started is easy, and HubSpot is user-friendly. And while this is true, if you’re new to the Inbound methodology and marketing automation, you might feel overwhelmed with how many functions you have.
How to Pick Between HubSpot and Netsuite CRM
If you want an all-in-one platform to manage your business, Netsuite makes sense. The CRM can be included with all the other features. HubSpot is for customer-centric companies that want to focus on providing a delightful customer experience.
Don’t rush into a decision.
Know Your Business Requirements
Look at your business performance reports and review your goals. Are you looking for growth? Do you want to scale? Knowing the trajectory of your business plays an essential part in your decision-making process.
Your team might be tech-savvy and not need as much hand-holding through implementation. You might be a larger company with a bigger budget to sink into a CRM. Only you know what your business needs.
Further, what tools do you need? Do you need a robust platform that offers multiple features? Or could you get started with a free package and scale? Knowing will help define your CRM strategy.
If you need to work on alignment between marketing and sales to develop qualified leads, decide which CRM software makes more sense.
Get Input From Various Teams
Who will be using the CRM on a day-to-day basis? With such a robust platform comes the need for alignment. Talk to your sales, marketing, and operations teams. What do they need? What tools will they get the most use out of?
You might also include design teams, as HubSpot offers a powerful CMS platform to host your website and align with other teams.
List the Essential Features you Need
What are the must-have features that will impact your operations? Maybe you want to create workflows and automate daily tasks. It could be that knowing your marketing campaign ROI is top of your list.
There will be other features that are nice to have but not necessary. Perhaps you don’t need more than 1000 contacts or a mobile app. Again, spend some time figuring out what’s most important to you.
Research and Take Advantage of Free Demos
You might have already started your research process, and it brought you here. Keep going. Look for user reviews, reach out to companies using the software, and compare user experiences against the promises made by each CRM vendor.
It’s a good idea to sign up for free trials and demos. Do CRM software providers allow access to all features? Can you get a sense of the product? It’s crucial to see if either CRM is the right fit for your needs. You might also request a live demo if a walkthrough is more convenient.
Netsuite CRM vs. HubSpot: The Choice is Yours
Netsuite CRM is a robust and comprehensive CRM solution that offers many features and integrations. However, it can be expensive and challenging to implement.
On the other hand, HubSpot is a more affordable and user-friendly CRM with robust marketing, sales, and customer support features. Still, it can also get more expensive as your company grows.
While Netsuite offers more features overall, HubSpot may be a better option for small businesses or businesses with limited budgets. Ultimately, the best CRM for your business will depend on your specific needs and goals.
If you’re leaning toward HubSpot and looking for a way to get your new website up and running as quickly and efficiently as possible, you may want to explore our Website Launch Kit!
