TL;DR: Quick Reference
- What: A practical guide to running Salesforce Financial Services Cloud alongside HubSpot for marketing, content, and service operations
- Key Benefit: Get vertical-specific CRM features from Salesforce FSC while leveraging HubSpot's superior marketing and service hub capabilities
- For: Wealth management firms, asset managers, and financial services organizations evaluating or optimizing dual-platform architectures
- Bottom Line: Let each platform do what it does best—Salesforce for financial services CRM, HubSpot for everything else
Here's a reality that doesn't fit neatly into the "HubSpot vs. Salesforce" narrative: many financial services firms run both platforms, and do so intentionally. Wealth management firms use Salesforce Financial Services Cloud for its industry-specific features — household management, financial account tracking, advisor-client relationship mapping — while running their entire marketing, content, and service operation on HubSpot. Asset management firms keep their institutional sales processes on Salesforce while using HubSpot Marketing Hub Enterprise to power their demand generation and event marketing.
At Vantage Point, this dual-platform pattern is one of the most common architectures we implement. Our background across both ecosystems isn't a hedge — it's a direct response to how financial services organizations actually operate.
The answer comes down to vertical specificity. Salesforce Financial Services Cloud was purpose-built for banking, wealth management, and insurance. It includes data models for financial accounts, financial goals, and securities, along with relationship mapping that understands household structures and referral networks. No other CRM, including HubSpot, replicates these features natively.
At the same time, HubSpot's marketing automation, content management, email marketing, and service hub capabilities are more intuitive, faster to deploy, and less expensive to operate than Salesforce's equivalent offerings. When a wealth management firm evaluates the full cost of implementing Marketing Cloud plus Pardot plus Service Cloud on Salesforce versus deploying Marketing Hub, Content Hub, and Service Hub on HubSpot, the economics strongly favor HubSpot for those functions.
The strategic answer is to let each platform do what it does best: Salesforce handles the financial services-specific CRM functionality, and HubSpot handles everything else.
HubSpot provides a native Salesforce integration that synchronizes data between the two platforms bidirectionally. At the basic level, this means contacts, companies, and deals can sync between systems, ensuring that marketing activity captured in HubSpot is visible to advisors working in Salesforce, and that client relationship data in Salesforce is available to marketing teams working in HubSpot.
For financial services implementations, we configure the integration with specific attention to several areas. Data flow direction is critical — you need to define which system is the source of truth for each data element. Typically, Salesforce is the source of truth for client relationship data and financial account information, while HubSpot is the source of truth for marketing engagement, content interactions, and service ticket history. Field mapping requires careful planning to ensure that the data elements each team needs are available in the platform they work in, without creating redundant or conflicting records. Sync rules should be configured so that the integration only transfers data that's relevant to the other platform — not everything, and not in both directions for every field.
Consider a wealth management and trust company — a real architecture we've implemented. On the Salesforce side, advisors manage client relationships, track financial accounts, log advisory interactions, and run compliance workflows. Salesforce Financial Services Cloud provides the data model and tools for this work. On the HubSpot side, the marketing team runs all campaigns, manages the company blog, sends client newsletters, handles event registration and follow-up, manages the client service ticketing system, and maintains the client-facing knowledge base.
The integration ensures that when a prospect engages with a marketing campaign on HubSpot, that engagement is visible to the advisor in Salesforce who ultimately has the relationship. Conversely, when a client's advisory relationship changes in Salesforce — for example, they're upgraded to a new service tier — that change syncs to HubSpot so the marketing team can adjust their segmentation and communication accordingly.
The most frequent issue we see is lack of clear data ownership. When two platforms can both create and modify the same records, you get data conflicts — duplicate contacts, inconsistent deal stages, and competing versions of the truth. The solution is establishing unambiguous rules at implementation: this platform creates this record type, that platform is read-only for that field, and conflict resolution follows these defined rules.
The second pitfall is over-integration. Not every data point needs to exist in both systems. Syncing too much data creates maintenance overhead, increases the risk of data quality issues, and can trigger API rate limits. We follow a principle of minimal necessary synchronization — transfer only the data that someone in the other system actually needs to do their job.
The third issue is change management. When teams are working across two platforms, clear processes must define where each activity happens. If an advisor can log a note in either Salesforce or HubSpot, you'll end up with fragmented client records. Define the workflow: advisors log activities in Salesforce, marketing logs activities in HubSpot, and the integration surfaces the combined picture to both teams.
The dual-platform approach works best when each platform's role is clearly defined and when the firm has a partner that understands both ecosystems. At Vantage Point, we maintain the integration as part of our managed services engagements, monitoring data synchronization, addressing integration issues, and evolving the architecture as the firm's needs change.
Over time, some firms may consolidate onto one platform as HubSpot continues to add industry-specific functionality or as Salesforce addresses its usability challenges. But for now, the dual-platform approach gives financial services firms the best of both worlds: deep vertical functionality where they need it, and operational efficiency where they need that.
About Vantage Point: Vantage Point is a boutique consulting firm exclusively serving financial services organizations. Our dual expertise across Salesforce and HubSpot allows us to design and maintain integrated architectures that leverage the strengths of both platforms. Learn more at vantagepoint.io.