Wealth management and trust companies face a technology decision that most other industries don't: they need a CRM that understands the specific language of their business — households, financial accounts, custodial relationships, beneficiaries, trusts — while also needing modern marketing, content, and service capabilities that help them attract and retain clients in an increasingly competitive landscape.
Salesforce Financial Services Cloud was built to address the first requirement. It provides data models and functionality specific to wealth management, including household relationship mapping, financial account tracking, referral management, and client financial goal tracking. But financial services cloud wasn't built to be a marketing platform, a content management system, or a customer service hub. That's where the architecture becomes interesting.
The pattern we've implemented at Vantage Point for wealth management and trust clients follows a clear division of labor. Salesforce Financial Services Cloud serves as the advisor's primary workspace — the system where they manage client relationships, view financial account data, track advisory activities, and maintain the compliance-required documentation of their client interactions. HubSpot serves as the platform for everything client-facing and operational outside of the advisory relationship itself.
On the HubSpot side, Marketing Hub powers client acquisition campaigns, prospect nurturing sequences, brand awareness content, and event marketing. Content Hub manages the firm's website, blog, and educational content library — materials that advisors share with clients and that prospects discover through search and social channels. Service Hub handles client service requests, onboarding workflows, and operational ticketing. The native Salesforce-HubSpot integration connects the two systems, ensuring that marketing engagement data is visible to advisors and that client relationship context informs marketing segmentation.
This is the question we get most often, and the answer is grounded in both economics and operational reality. Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Salesforce Service Cloud are capable platforms, but they carry significant cost premiums and implementation complexity. For a wealth management firm with 20 to 50 advisors and a lean marketing team, the total cost of implementing and maintaining Marketing Cloud, Pardot, and Service Cloud on top of Financial Services Cloud can be two to three times the cost of running those same functions on HubSpot.
Beyond cost, there's the user experience factor. Marketing teams consistently find HubSpot faster to work in for campaign creation, email design, content publication, and workflow automation. Service teams find the ticketing and knowledge base tools more intuitive. And perhaps most importantly, HubSpot's implementation timeline for these functions is measured in weeks, whereas equivalent Salesforce deployments often take months.
The wealth management firms that work with us don't choose this architecture because they're cutting corners. They choose it because they get superior marketing and service capabilities at lower cost, faster deployment, and higher team adoption — while retaining the Salesforce Financial Services Cloud functionality that their advisory practice depends on.
Client onboarding is one of the most critical processes in wealth management, and it typically spans both platforms in a dual-system architecture. When a new client engagement begins, the advisory team creates the client record in Salesforce Financial Services Cloud, establishing the household structure, linking financial accounts, and initiating the advisory documentation process. Simultaneously, HubSpot workflows trigger the operational onboarding sequence: welcome email series, document collection workflows, meeting scheduling, and service team notifications.
The integration ensures that both sides of the onboarding process stay synchronized. When the advisory team updates the client's status in Salesforce, HubSpot's workflows advance accordingly. When the client completes onboarding steps through HubSpot — uploading documents, scheduling their first review meeting, acknowledging disclosures — those completions are reflected in the Salesforce record.
This coordinated approach means that both the advisory team and the operations team have visibility into the full onboarding journey, reducing the communication gaps that historically cause client frustration during the most sensitive phase of the relationship.
Wealth management firms operate under SEC and/or FINRA oversight in the US, FCA regulations in the UK, and similar frameworks in other jurisdictions. The dual-platform architecture supports compliance through clear data ownership: advisory activities are documented in Salesforce with the audit trail that regulators expect, while marketing and service communications are documented in HubSpot with their own comprehensive logging.
When a regulator examines your firm's communications, you need to produce records of every client-facing interaction — marketing emails, service requests, advisory communications, and any content delivered to clients. HubSpot logs marketing and service interactions automatically, with full timestamps and user attribution. Salesforce Financial Services Cloud logs advisory activities. Together, they provide the complete communication record that regulatory examinations require.
The wealth management firms we've implemented this architecture for consistently report improvements across several dimensions. Marketing execution speed increases because the marketing team can move from idea to campaign to deployment without waiting for Salesforce administration support. Advisor adoption of the CRM improves because the Salesforce environment stays focused on the advisory workflow it was designed for, without being cluttered with marketing and service functionality. Client onboarding time decreases because automated HubSpot workflows handle operational steps that were previously manual. And total CRM cost decreases because HubSpot handles the functions where Salesforce pricing is most premium.
About Vantage Point: Vantage Point was founded by David Cockrum, a former COO of a wealth management firm who grew a practice from $400 million to $4.5 billion in assets under management using both Salesforce and HubSpot. We bring authentic industry practitioner experience to every engagement. Learn more at vantagepoint.io.