With the proliferation of sales, marketing and customer experience software in the cloud, it’s very easy for an employee to purchase the software, and then submit a monthly expense claim to add that software to your company’s ever-growing toolkit. Whatever their reasons, this means every business might have a range of software they are paying for that they aren’t making proper use of — or maybe don’t even know about.
This comes with a large hidden expense. While a different solution may claim to be the master of one function instead of a jack of all trades, it comes at a price: integrating with other tools for a single customer record or for accurate reporting.
There are huge costs associated with scripting a custom integration, a monthly cost to use middleware like Scribe to bridge the gap, or the hours of manually collating spreadsheets to get systems to integrate.
In our research and experience, we’ve found that there are only two service providers that companies should consider for sales, marketing and customer experience, regardless of their size: HubSpot and SalesForce. These two platforms have a complete set of products to address your needs, that automatically integrate with each other and can truly scale with a business.
All cards on the table: we’re a HubSpot partner. From a cost and ease-of-use perspective, we favour the HubSpot solution by far.
Below is a comparison table of alternative technology vendors. We’ve used online pricing for each of the individual products you would need if you did not take the full HubSpot or SalesForce suite for the month of August, 2019. Some products don’t publish their pricing and we chose the “most popular” package that each tool recommends.
Marketing Technology Table
Tool/Function |
Alternative |
Cost of Alternative |
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Twitter Listening |
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Ads Google |
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SEO |
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Website |
WordPress | - | |
Landing Pages |
Unbounce | $ 199 | |
Blog |
WordPress | - | |
Marketing Automation |
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Analytics |
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Free | |
Live Chat & Bots |
Drift | $ 400 | |
Total |
$ 4,226 |
Sales Technology
Tool/Function |
Alternative |
Cost of Alternative |
Pipeline / Deal / Opportunity Management |
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Document Library |
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$ 20 / user $ 17.30 / user |
Tasks |
Trello | - |
Call Recording |
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$45 |
Calendar / Meeting booking |
Calendly | $8 / user |
Playbooks |
vPlaybook | Unknown |
Quotes |
PandaDoc | $49 |
Total |
Assume 10 sales people: $ 834 |
Customer Service and Experience Technology
Tool/Function |
Alternative |
Cost of Alternative |
Tickets |
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NPS/CSAT surveys |
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Knowledge Base |
$ 32 / user | |
Total |
Assume 10 support people: $ 1,034 |
This investigation found that if you use any of these standalone tools, the costs quickly add up and you’d be better off switching to the suite of HubSpot or SalesForce products. Contact Us for more information.