As the world turns and the game of marketing continues to evolve, grow, and mutate in ways unimaginable, it's important for companies to have some sort of customer relationship management software to have a baseline of sanity throughout it all. Not to mention the inherent benefits of customer management that comes with a CRM.
Software Cost Analysis
So what are the actual costs behind these CRMs? According to research done on the Total Cost of Ownership of HubSpot vs. Salesforce, 65% of those surveyed reported spending between $2,000 and $10,000 monthly on their CRM and integrated sales, marketing and service software. This research also noted that those costs are typically the same whether it's HubSpot or Salesforce.
This might seem like a large span of costs, but the truth is that your business functions and needs highly dictate the functionality, which usually translates into additional costs.
Keep reading as we analyze a hypothetical company that sells Guitars, as our example.
Let's Take a Look at our Guitar Company
Our guitar company needs to be able to track customer data and keep an active sync between our guitar inventory and HubSpot. This ensures that we can run highly targeted marketing campaigns and send truthful and highly targeted emails to prospective customers and existing customers in an attempt to purchase new gear. With HubSpot as a example, we’re already looking at:
Marketing Hub Enterprise ($3,600/mo): Grants us access to Custom Objects, which we would use for Inventory management. It also allows us to do multi-touch revenue attribution.
CMS Hub Enterprise ($1200/mo): Grants us the ability to use Serverless Functions to facilitate our data transfer from our data warehouse to HubSpot.
Operations Hub Pro ($720/mo): Grants us the ability to send web hooks with data to a Serverless Function. It allows us to add custom-coded actions to workflows so we can manipulate the data from the serverless function and schedule workflow triggers. It also can ensure our data is updated every 30 minutes.
Off the bat, without any extra mind being paid to development and project management time/costs, we’re looking at $5520/mo, just slightly above the middle point of average CRM monthly costs. This also puts our guitar company in line with our research of what is the monthly spending range used by most companies.
The Total Cost of Ownership research tell us that 35% of all companies using HubSpot spent approximately $5,001 - $10,000/mo on their CRM and integrated sales, marketing and service software per month!
While these tiers give us great benefits, they’re still not potentially everything we need. That includes things such as:
- Developer costs to create and maintain the data transfer between HubSpot and our data warehouse.
- Developer costs to create new functionality that is desired within HubSpot.
Internal staffing costs to maintain and manage marketing operations in HubSpot. - Etcetera. You can quickly see how costs can balloon up depending on feature sets and the need for staffing to handle the CRM at its core.
But you know what? Throughout our extensive and scientific research, we found that HubSpot users are more likely to feel that the costs associated with their sales and marketing technology are worth it! We found that 50% of HubSpot users strongly agree that the overall cost of their CRM and integrated sales/marketing technology is worth the price they pay, compared to 41% of Salesforce users!
So, by going with HubSpot as your CRM solution, you’re bound to not only be successful and ahead of the competition, but also aligned with others in spending, who use the platform successfully.
Are There Alternatives?
There are, of course, ways to cut some spending down including hiring experts who know all the ins, outs and shortcuts of a CRM system, like our team here at Aptitude 8!
Don’t want to spend $1200/mo on CMS Hub Enterprise just for Serverless Functions? No worries! We know great alternatives that reproduce the functionality of serverless functions that, are not only more secure and faster, but allow you to greatly expand the capabilities of HubSpot in ways that were unimaginable. Not to mention you could potentially remove the need for Operations Hub Pro as well, saving you a potential total of $1920 a month! Talk about a deal!
Need your marketing teams to have a crash course in HubSpot and advice on how to best run their marketing operations within it? A great HubSpot partner can absolutely do this for you and for much less than the cost and time it would take to “jump into the fray” and figure it out internally.
Our Marketing Operations experts are the best in the HubSpot ecosystem and every conversation with them will literally blow your mind in the knowledge and maneuverability that your company can enjoy in HubSpot.
Research Tells us HubSpot is the Way To Go
So, if your company is spending what you feel is a large amount of money on a CRM system monthly, just know that you’re in great company. And if you’re using HubSpot, research shows that your money is being spent to a great effect.
But if you feel like you’re paying more than what you should be, reach out us here at Aptitude 8. We'll take a look and see if we can help you reduce your costs and make your CRM system more efficient and powerful.
