Here's something we didn't expect to be writing when we founded Vantage Point as a Salesforce-focused consultancy in 2018: a growing number of our financial services clients are choosing HubSpot over Salesforce for their sales operations. Not as a complement to Salesforce — as a replacement for the sales workflows they've been running on Salesforce for years.
This isn't a story about small firms that can't afford Salesforce. We're seeing this with institutional asset managers, wealth management firms, and regulated financial services organizations that have the budget for any platform they want. They're choosing HubSpot deliberately, and the reasons tell you something important about where the CRM market is heading.
The consistent theme we hear from clients is operational friction. Salesforce is extraordinarily powerful, but that power comes with a weight that many financial services organizations find disproportionate to their actual needs. Sales teams describe their Salesforce experience with words like "heavy-handed" — too many clicks to log an activity, too much administrative overhead to manage pipelines, and too much dependence on a dedicated Salesforce administrator to make even modest changes.
For a wealth management firm with a 20-person advisory team or an asset management firm scaling its institutional sales function, that overhead is a meaningful drag on productivity. The platform's flexibility becomes a liability when it requires a consultant every time you want to modify a workflow or add a field. Financial services sales teams need tools that accelerate their client interactions, not tools that require their own support infrastructure.
When we say HubSpot is easier to use, we're not talking about aesthetics. We're talking about speed to solution — how quickly a firm can go from identifying a business need to having a working solution in production. On HubSpot, a sales operations manager can create a new pipeline, configure deal stages, build associated workflows, and deploy them to the team in a matter of hours. The equivalent on Salesforce typically requires more technical configuration, often involving a Salesforce administrator or consultant.
We saw this play out with one of our clients — an institutional asset manager that was deploying Marketing Hub Enterprise before deciding to add Sales Hub Enterprise. Their sales team had been running outbound processes on Salesforce but was frustrated by the disconnect between their marketing activities (which were performing well on HubSpot) and the sales follow-up that was supposed to flow from them. When they evaluated adding Sales Hub, the speed at which they could stand up functional sales workflows — prospecting sequences, pipeline management, meeting scheduling, automated follow-up — was dramatically faster than equivalent Salesforce deployments they'd experienced in the past.
This is the legitimate concern, and it deserves a direct answer. HubSpot Sales Hub Enterprise has matured significantly and now supports the pipeline complexity that financial services firms require: multiple pipelines for different business lines (new business, renewals, cross-sell), custom deal properties for tracking financial services-specific data, approval workflows, and granular permissions that control who can see and modify what.
That said, if your organization has highly customized Salesforce implementations with extensive Apex code, complex custom objects, and deeply embedded integrations with financial services-specific platforms like portfolio management systems or compliance engines, HubSpot may not be a like-for-like replacement. The firms where we see the strongest fit are those running what we'd call "Salesforce standard" — using the platform's core CRM functionality without heavy custom development. For those firms, HubSpot delivers equivalent or superior functionality with substantially less operational overhead.
Many of our clients operate both platforms — and that's a perfectly valid architecture. A wealth management firm might use Salesforce Financial Services Cloud for the advisory-specific functionality it provides (household management, financial account tracking, referral networks) while running marketing, content, and service operations entirely on HubSpot. The native Salesforce-HubSpot integration supports this dual-platform approach, synchronizing data between the systems so that both sales and marketing teams have the context they need.
At Vantage Point, our background across both ecosystems is a significant advantage here. We can honestly assess which platform is the right fit for which function within a given financial services organization, because we've implemented both extensively and we're not locked into recommending one over the other.
Total cost of ownership is where HubSpot's advantage becomes most tangible for mid-market financial services firms. HubSpot bundles more functionality into its core subscriptions — marketing automation, content management, reporting, and AI tools are included rather than sold as add-ons. Salesforce's model requires separate purchases for many of these capabilities, and the cost of ongoing administration, consulting, and customization adds up significantly over time.
We've seen firms reduce their CRM-related costs by 30-50% when migrating sales operations from Salesforce to HubSpot, while simultaneously improving user adoption because the team actually wants to use the tool. In financial services, where advisor and salesperson adoption of CRM is historically a challenge, that's not a minor consideration.
Financial services firms that are strong candidates for moving sales operations to HubSpot typically share a few characteristics: they're in the mid-market segment with sales teams ranging from 10 to 200 people, they're not heavily invested in Salesforce custom development, they value user adoption over platform flexibility, and they want their sales and marketing operations to run on a unified platform rather than stitching together separate systems with integration middleware.
If that sounds like your organization, a conversation about what a transition looks like is worth having. At Vantage Point, we start with an honest assessment of your current Salesforce footprint, including the technical debt that's accumulated, and map out what a HubSpot deployment would look like — including what you'd gain, what you'd need to solve for differently, and what the realistic timeline and investment looks like.
About Vantage Point: Vantage Point is a boutique consulting firm exclusively serving financial services organizations. With deep expertise across both HubSpot and Salesforce, we help clients make honest, strategic decisions about their CRM platform — and then deliver world-class implementations on whichever platform is the right fit. Learn more at vantagepoint.io.