Not All Roads Lead to Rome

At the end of August in 2024, I began interviewing with PhoneBurner. Like many companies that are looking for a new RevOps leader, there were some pain points the team was looking to overcome. These included a CRM integration the team had outgrown, lack of trust in data, and a desire for a simpler tech stack. Several people mentioned they thought Hubspot might be the better CRM for them, but it was going to be 'up to me'. 

Fast forward a few weeks, I was in Florida on fall break with the family. I realized how ironic it would be if I also wanted to rip out Salesforce. After all, I've used it for 15 years, and even worked there. I used to say "all roads lead to Rome" and I meant Salesforce. I'm the first to say that I owe a lot to them professionally and respect everyone I know there. 

So on a whim I posted about this on LinkedIn —and the post got way more pickup than I imagined. As a result, I owe a ton of people an update on the decision I've made. Ready!?

When all was said and done, we made the call to go with Hubspot for our CRM. This was surprising to even myself, but I'm very excited and I think it will be the right choice. Given that we are craving a simple and straightforward process, many of Hubspot's standard features will meet our needs. The fewer integrations and custom code, the better. 

Some things I really liked about Hubspot: 

1. The UI is much more intuitive and modern and I know this will help adoption 
2. We can shorten and simplify the sales process in this fresh start
3. Standard sales email functionality will meet our needs, no extra sales engagement tool required 
4. Deep integration between CRM and marketing attribution, engagement, scoring data 
5. Ability to add custom events for key product milestones and view them sequentially
6. Better visuals in reporting and default analysis for funnel velocity and efficiency
7. We get a big upgrade from manual order form creation to Hubspot's products and quotes features. We may save money on Docusign too 
8. No more worries about trying to manage the finicky Salesforce-Hubspot integration 
9. Great integration to PhoneBurner, allowing us to fully use our own platform better 
10. A chance to redesign the internal product integration to create PhoneBurner users in the CRM without having to use the lead object. 

Many of these improvements could have been done on Salesforce, but the time and cost involved were very high. The work to change Salesforce would ultimately be equal or greater to migrating to Hubspot. Of course, the cost savings involved are also important. If we can get the PLG features to work for us in Hubspot, will save money on adding a tool that can support some of the product-led and product-aware sales and marketing strategies we need. For half the current Sales Cloud cost, I was able to get parity on sales functionality, additional data enrichment features, the addition of Ops Hub, and it INCLUDED marketing automation. I know for many Hubspot has seemed expensive lately, but we are still coming out way ahead on expense. 

As you can imagine, we're now deep in the migration planning process. I'm excited to be working with friends over at The Operations Company to knock this out of the park quickly. 

I hope this was sufficient to satisfy the curiosity as well as open your eyes to the fact that not all businesses HAVE to run on Salesforce. Even with multiple GTM motions, PLG, and tons of customers, we're determined at PhoneBurner to have a customer journey that is simple, elegant, and puts the customer first. 

More to come! 🔥

Mallory