HubSpot vs Marketo :: CRM Solution Review

Customer Relationship Management (or CRM) solutions have been around for some time, but more recently these powerful sales and support business tools are crossing over into the world of marketing – or at least, sales lead generation. The problem? All claim to have a lead-generation or lead-acquisition component but which CRM solution is really going to take your marketing to the next level? Let’s review.

As a business consultant, I have no time for recommending ‘toys’ for marketing departments to play with. I don’t care about your branded URL shortener. I don’t care about the latest version of Creative Suite. I care about more leads that convert into more sales, which close quickly, have a very low turnover, and show opportunities for up-sell/cross-sell.

As CRMs begin to become a more valuable tool for the WHOLE organization (marketing, sales, support, delivery and executives), I felt it critical to review a few of them for my clients. After a dozen or so demos of some of the top 360-degree CRM solutions on the market, I compiled the following no-nonsense comparison of the top two: HubSpot & Marketo.

HubSpot: hubspot.com

According to them, “HubSpot’s vision is to provide a (killer) marketing application and provide great advice to businesses of all sizes enabling them to leverage these disruptive effects of the internet to “get found” by more prospects shopping in their niche, convert a higher percentage of prospects into customers and analyze the results to figure out what works for their target audience.”

Target Market: Mid-market Enterprises
Clients: 5500 (invested in by SFDC & Google)
PROs: User friendly, no programming, includes SEO and Social Media tools
Price Point: $1000/month
Features: Email Campaigns, Lead Nurturing, Tracking, event marketing, mobile, chat
Integration: SFDC (best plugin!), No WebEx (but they’re working on it)
TCO: Professional help gets you going. Perfect for smaller businesses.

Marketo: marketo.com

According to them, “Marketo is built by marketers, for marketers. It combines everything you need to manage demand generation campaigns and generate quality sales leads – including email marketing, lead nurturing and lead scoring – with analytics to measure marketing ROI and forecast marketing’s impact on revenue.”

Target Market: Enterprises-level (large organizations)
Clients: ~~900~~ 1400+ (includes clients of their dressed-down solution, SPARK)
PROs: Can be customized/programmed to fit any situation. Social integration is awesome!
Price Point: $2000/month (for professionals with up to 10 users)
Features: Advanced Email Campaign Management, Advanced (segmented) Lead Nurturing, Tracking, event marketing, mobile, (no chat)
Integration: Radian6, all of the Big 5 webinar providers (GoToMeeting, WebEx, etc.)
TCO: Pretty much requires a marketing/CRM technology manageror champion

The Simple Takeaway

If you take the time to closely understand the above and you’ve done as many CRM demos as I have recently, this is the simple takeaway:

Infusionsoft would be good for a novice for both CRM and Marketing (i.e. integrated SFA/CRM with marketing automation). For SMbs and mid-market buyers on SalesForce.com, I would recommend Hubspot after looking at all the options (features, app exchange, and investment by SalesForce.com). For folks with a marketing staff or for agencies, Marketo makes makes the most sense.

Do you have any experience with any of the CRM-for-marketing solutions we’ve discussed? Comment your thoughts below. Also, stay tuned for a white paper on CRM selection sponsored by Ephor Group.

UPDATE: Lots of valuable comments/corrections below. Be sure to give ’em the once-over.

Share the love:

Discussion

Kim Albee says:

11.21.2011 at 5:00 PM

Hubspot’s lead nurturing capability is very narrow in what it allows you to do — from what I’ve seen of it, it dictates when the emails will go out and how many. You can determine your email copy. Everyone who submits a form is basically sent this “nurturing sequence” — whether it’s a fit for them or not.

There are other options (and my company, Genoo, is one of them) that offers the ability to create nurturing sequences, where you pick what triggers them, and can establish the emails that go out and when they go out, along with a choice to suspend other nurturing that might be assigned to the lead.

An example of this is perhaps when you get a lead initially, perhaps you would send an initial “welcome” sequence. Then they download a whitepaper on topic A, so you suspend the welcome sequence, and start them on a sequence that is relevant to topic A. And it continues from there.

Having tools that are affordable, that allow you this sort of targeting is important, but it’s not what Hubspot offers in their current set.

Mike Volpe says:

11.21.2011 at 5:29 PM

I just want to clarify a couple things. (FYI, I work at HubSpot.)

1) HubSpot vs. Marketo, et al.
HubSpot is a complete marketing system. HubSpot has much more complete marketing functionality than Eloqua, Marketo, Pardot, Market2Lead, Manticore, Silverpop, etc. Those systems are all specialized on lead nurturing. The problem HubSpot solves is how do you get more leads and customers, so HubSpot also includes tools to help you get more leads – SEO tools, social media monitoring and participation, blog publishing and optimization, etc. Those other systems do not have any of this type of functionality. They absolutely are far more customizable and deep in terms of specific lead nurturing functionality, but they are also more expensive, more complicated, and in our opinion lack key marketing functionality.

2) HubSpot integrates with any CMS
HubSpot integrates with any CMS. We have hundreds of customers that use a variety of different CMS systems and use HubSpot for their marketing software. The confusion might be that to integrate with your own CMS, you need to buy HubSpot Marketer ($500/month) rather than our other product. HubSpot Marketer is still way more affordable than Eloqua.

3) HubSpot leads in market adoption
HubSpot has more customers. Specifically, we have about 3 times more customers than Eloqua and 7 times more customers than Marketo. I am not sure why other companies say they are the “leader” when they have so few customers.

4) HubSpot supports multiple lead nurturing campaigns
HubSpot’s lead nurturing functionality does support multiple campaigns or multiple sets of emails. When the functionality first came out (2 months ago) it only supported one campaign. But, we ship new enhancements every 30 days and we have already added this functionality. So, if you have 3 whitepapers and 2 webinars, you can send 5 different followup email series (one for each landing page/offer). This multiple campaign functionality is available in our HubSpot Marketer product ($500/month), but not our less expensive product, so perhaps that is the confusion.

HubSpot sells to companies of all sizes and we have customers from very small companies to companies with hundreds or thousands of employees. We’d love to have you join our community. Let me know if someone on our team can answer any more specific questions you have.

Gaurav Kotak says:

11.23.2011 at 3:34 PM

You make a great point Charles. Despite the maturity of CRM software applications, it is only recently that we have begun to see the innovation and robust capabilities that help prove the true value of marketing automation.

As you guide your customers in their marketing automation software selection, I would encourage you to consider both their current and future goals to ensure the chosen solution can evolve with the customer’s business needs.

Let me add some more details and clarify a few points:

1) Marketo now has over 1400 customers. We sell to organizations of all sizes and are pretty equally weighed across enterprise, mid-market and SMB customers. While Marketo is best suited for organizations with a marketing professional, we have many customers with a 1-person marketing team.

2) We focus on being leaders in providing the most comprehensive solution that is core to organizations’ marketing and sales success. A solution that is easy to use and scales to meet the needs of large global enterprises. Our customers, on average, are seeing a 22% increase in number of leads, of which 21% more convert to sales accepted opportunities. We also focus on providing thought leadership and best practices. E.g. our definite guides and other content at http://www.marketo.com/b2b-marketing-resources/category/best-practices have been downloaded over a 100,000 times!

3) Yes we do see nurturing as a key component to drive value, and have invested in offering highly customizable and sophisticated multi-step lead nurturing functionality. For example, when a new prospect registers on your site or downloads your trial, you can automatically send them a series of intelligent interactions on a regular basis to help educate and nurture the relationship.

4) Marketo supports powerful, WYSIWYG Landing Pages and Smart Lead Capture Forms that easily integrates with your Website no matter whether it’s custom-built or leverages a CMS. We integrate with best-in-class blogging or SEO tools like WordPress, BrightEdge etc.

5) Marketo also helps organization improve their sales effectiveness. Sales reps can focus their time on the Best Bets across the leads they own, or want to follow. “Interesting Moments” highlight the key events that really help sales focus on the right action at the right time.

6) One of the key ingredients is tight integration with CRM systems. For example, Marketo provides an out-of-the-box, two-way, instant sync with standard and custom objects in Salesforce.com. The sync is adaptive too, so if your CRM schema changes, Marketo automatically captures them.

Hope this helps. We’re happy to answer any other question you may have.

Peter Caputa says:

11.28.2011 at 3:11 PM

@Justin. The timing still doesn’t make sense. But, no big deal.

Two corrections:

What Kim wrote about our lead nurturing capabilities is outdated. HubSpot acquired marketing automation provider, Performable, 6+ months ago and we’ve integrated the multi-channel marketing automation that they had created into our HubSpot Enterprise product. Jon Ravesi can point you to training webinars about it, that were specifically done for our marketing agency partners.

Also, we haven’t had a “HubSpot Marketer product” in more than a year. We changed the names. The equivalent product now is HubSpot Professional. So, what you re-posted from Mike is significantly outdated. Here is our product matrix.

Since you’re speaking with Jon tomorrow, it’s probably best to shift the conversation to “how we can help your agency” and “help your clients”. Our services for agencies and their clients go way beyond our software. Of course, that’s a critical piece. So, we’ll be interested in your feedback once you’ve done a more thorough evaluation of how we can help you.

As far as evaluating whether we can help your marketing firm, I recommend completing our marketing agency evaluation tool so that we can diagnose areas where you can grow your firm, while delivering additional value to your clients. There are 22 apps in our product and there are even more apps integrated with our product available through our app marketplace. Comparing Marketo to HubSpot is like comparing apples to oranges.

Good luck in your evaluation.

Andy Xhignesse says:

11.30.2011 at 8:04 AM

I’ll share my voice here although it is a one sided one because I have limited understanding of the Marketo product. That said, my understanding is that having someone within an organization or company who is ‘fluent or native’ is important as related to the Marketo product offering. This factor alone will prevent many in the SME sector from being able to successfully engage the solution…I stand to be corrected on this, but that is the perception.

Alternatively the Hubspot offering is very user friendly and offers a comprehensive set of tools within the platform to drive traffic, leads and sales in the right direction. What else? As a VAR of the product I will offer one adjective to describe the experience: excellent. Whether the adjective is applied to support, ongoing product development, educational resources, quality of personnel, the adjective is sticky. Am I alone in this view? No. I’ve either spoken with or been in online conversations with many other VARs where this adjective is appropriate to the experience. Hubspot product, whether as a VAR or customer (IME is both), is probably the best money that a company can invest if they are looking to enjoy a similar experience…I said this would be one sided didn’t I?

Justin says:

12.02.2011 at 12:44 PM

I can appreciate a little shameless self-promoting on our “Shameless News” blog. No worries ;)

I would agree that Hubspot is VERY user-friendly. However, during a recent conversation a sales guy at Hubspot, I found the way they tier out their solution makes it difficult for SMBs to get started.

For example, if your business already has a CMS website with hundreds of pages or more, or you just don’t want to use ‘their’ CMS, you have to upgrade to their top-tier enterprise package ($1400+/month) for integration.

So that means, a little business that was saving money building and maintaining their own CMS site must then pay for the very top tier if they don’t want to jump their digital ship.

Listen, I get Hubspot and its VARs want to be ‘sticky’, but I don’t appreciate having to jump through hoops. My clients have even less patience for such a “gotcha” model.

Comments are now closed.

Get the Email

Join 1000+ other subscribers. Only 1 digest email per month. We'll never share your address. Unsubscribe anytime. It won't hurt our feelings (much).