Is it time to break up with Salesforce?

You’re not alone in wondering if it’s time for a change 

Many teams choose Salesforce expecting scalability and power—only to find themselves burdened by complexity, tech sprawl, and fragile admin dependencies. 

You might be asking: 

• Are we investing heavily in our CRM and still struggling to scale? 

• Do we rely on one person to manage Salesforce? 

• Is our CRM adding cost and friction instead of driving alignment and growth? 

This guide outlines the real-world frustrations organizations experience with Salesforce, why more companies are choosing HubSpot instead, and what to know before making the switch. 

P A I N   P O I N T S

The friction teams are feeling with Salesforce

Overbuilt, underused — and overwhelming 

For many organizations, Salesforce has morphed into a patchwork of customizations, add-ons, and bolt-on tools that only one internal expert truly understands. Leading organizations to experience the following frustrations: 

• Admin complexity keeps the average user locked out of core tasks 

• Teams are afraid to touch fields or settings because they fear they’ll “break something” 

• Even simple workflows often require deep technical knowledge to execute and maintain 

In contrast, HubSpot is more accessible by design. Admin and non-admin users alike can confidently configure automation, update properties, and make system improvements with clear visibility into downstream effects - without needing to escalate to a technical expert. 

Admin dependency and operational risk 

Salesforce Administrators are expensive – and for good reason – maintaining intricate and highly customized Salesforce systems takes highly specialized skillsets. Unfortunately for many organizations, they quickly find themselves relying on a single Salesforce admin and backing themselves into a corner against critical bottlenecks: 

• Knowledge loss when an admin leaves the business 

• Growing backlog of requests for standard updates, leading to operational inefficiencies  

• Dependency on expensive external resources to maintain CRM data and experience 

While both platforms require thoughtful configuration, HubSpot’s structure enables broader enablement and self-sufficiency across teams. While teams still often require dedicated administrative and operational support to maintain their systems, the breadth of operational knowledge is known to be wider among HubSpot teams due to its intuitive interface. This minimizes dependencies on a singular expert for daily CRM functions.  

High costs — but not always where you think 

When Salesforce first enters the picture, the focus tends to be on license cost. But over time, teams realize that’s just the beginning. The real cost often emerges from what it takes to make Salesforce work in practice — namely, the expanding web of tools, integrations, and workarounds required to fill gaps in usability and functionality. 

• Sales teams often add tools like Outreach, Salesloft, Calendly, or Gong to their Salesforce stack to equip their sales team properly 

• Marketing may layer in additional automation or analytics tools to measure impact on sales efforts 

• Data integration often requires a platform like Workato or MuleSoft to ensure all data is flowing cleanly and safely into Salesforce 

This kind of stack sprawl introduces more than just increasing costs. It slows teams down, fractures data, increases user complexity, and forces SalesOps and RevOps teams to spend more time keeping the lights on than driving strategic improvements. 

With HubSpot, core functionality like sequences, meeting scheduling, reporting, and automation natively enables meaningful tool consolidation, reducing overhead. 

Companies lose up to 50% of operational efficiency due to redundant systems and tech friction (Forrester).

Poor adoption due to system complexity 

It’s not that sales teams refuse to use Salesforce—it’s that they’re not set up to use it fully, confidently, or independently. 

The learning curve is steep, and the interface can feel overwhelming without technical support. As a result, reps often stay within their comfort zones, performing only the minimum actions they know how to complete. When a process requires something outside that comfort zone—like creating a custom report or updating a campaign object—they may delay, delegate, or skip it altogether. 

This leads to: 

• Gaps in data and reporting 

• Workflow breakdowns between teams 

• Over-reliance on RevOps or a single admin for everyday tasks 

HubSpot, by comparison, lowers the barrier to participation. It allows reps, marketers, and customer teams to self-serve more of what they need—without fear of breaking the system or needing an admin to hold their hand. 

The result is faster execution, more complete data, and a CRM that becomes a true source of truth instead of an afterthought. 

A 2023 report by Validity found that only 34% of Salesforce customers say their users fully adopt the platform (Validity 2023 State of CRM Data). 

Reporting blind spots and siloed teams 

Salesforce is capable of complex reporting—but only if your inputs are equally complex. To produce meaningful, multi-dimensional insights, you need to: 

• Integrate and normalize data from across your stack 

• Build and maintain intricate workflows that govern attribution, lifecycle stages, and lead management 

• Ensure multiple team members are trained on how to build, modify, and troubleshoot those workflows to avoid bottlenecks and reduce single points of failure 

Without this level of planning and upkeep, reporting in Salesforce often becomes fragmented and slow. Teams rely on disconnected dashboards, inconsistent attribution logic, or third-party tools just to get basic answers which causes misalignment across teams. 

HubSpot offers a simpler approach—because it was built with RevOps reporting at its core.

Key insights like custom journey tracking, funnel and pipeline analytics, conversion rates, and velocity metrics are all native to the platform. With marketing, sales, and service activity living in one unified system, reporting is inherently more connected, and lifecycle visibility is easier to achieve and scale. Teams can explore, understand, and act on insights faster—without needing to be platform experts or relying on stitched-together dashboards. 

C O M P A R I S O N

Salesforce stack vs. HubSpot: What can be Replaced

Addressing common migration concerns

I M P A C T

Digital transformation is more than changing your CRM

Migrating CRMs is an opportunity to rethink more than just your tech stack. 

Organizations that treat migration as a true digital transformation initiative—not just a platform migration—see the greatest long-term impact. 

That means: 

• Rethinking how teams collaborate, share data, and execute campaigns 
• Involving cross-functional stakeholders early 
• Documenting core processes and re-aligning ownership 
• Empowering non-technical users to own key workflows 

Check out the case study below to see how Townsend Energy migrated not only their sales team from Salesforce to HubSpot, but also brought their marketing and customer service functions into the platform - enabling them to measure their end-to-end customer journey with HubSpot.

What success looks like post-migration

When organizations make the move to HubSpot, the benefits go beyond platform usability—they see measurable improvements in how their teams operate and how their business performs.

From faster deal cycles to more aligned revenue teams, the impact of simplifying and streamlining your systems shows where it matters most. Teams that make the move to HubSpot often report: 

• 129% increase in inbound leads 

• 35% more deals closed within 6 months 

• 20–30% faster sales cycles 

HubSpot CRM ROI Study

N E X T   S T E P S

Is it time to reevaluate?

If your current CRM is slowing down your teams, inflating your tech costs, or limiting visibility, it’s time to pause.

And if you’re answering “yes” to more than one of the questions below—it's probably time to make a change. 

• Is our data too fragmented to give leadership a clear, end-to-end view of how the business is actually performing? 

• Are we spending time and budget maintaining systems instead of executing campaigns or closing deals?  

• Do we feel like we’re not getting the return we should from our CRM investment?  

• Is it difficult to adapt or evolve our systems without external help?  

With the right strategic partner guiding your transformation, it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. It can be the foundation for how your teams grow smarter, move faster, and work better together.