Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a practice that’s both old and new. While it is a concept and process that has been around for quite some time, thanks to the emergence of the cloud, it’s changed. The cloud both enables and empowers new CRM vendors to operate on a larger level, now making this available to all types of businesses, globally.
In turn, the businesses who have used CRM processes can now optimize various important activities such as Sales, Marketing (email), Operations, and more. They can also connect their CRM to their ERP platform to fill any gaps in their needs and build a better knowledge base of their target customers’ journey as Sales works to close deals.
Request More Info From an Expert
What is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tool?
Let’s start by defining what a CRM tool is and typically does. Taking and compiling data from various sources, this system lets businesses use these findings to better understand and reach their target customers. Some of the sources and channels this data could come from include: websites and online forms or marketing materials, email and chats, and of course, social media.
Thanks to this useful data, businesses can identify and categorize new leads, focusing on the ones with the most potential, allowing Sales teams to work more efficiently when closing a deal.
Marketing teams can also continue to work on other leads, enhancing their quality and interest, nurturing them for future potential.
NetSuite as a CRM
As a whole, NetSuite is more than just a CRM, it’s an ERP platform; it can be used for streamlining functions like accounting and financial reporting, human capital management, professional services automation, and more.
In fact, most businesses use NetSuite ERP to facilitate and visualize these financial planning and data analysis tasks.
Learn more about Business Intelligence for NetSuite, Powered by GURUS.
For our purposes, we’re looking at NetSuite as a CRM. NetSuite CRM brings together and offers a full view of prospects, leads, and vendors so Sales and Marketing can track and improve customer experience. By tracking the customer journey as they become leads, teams are able to increase the number of sales they close.
What is HubSpot?
HubSpot is built mainly for enhancing customer experience through inbound marketing (email) and sales. Simply put: unlike NetSuite, HubSpot is focused only on CRM capabilities.
It’s well-known for its easy-to-use aspects, known as modules. HubSpot is also very popular for its content management system (CMS), which can be used as an integration between its CRM and web pages - this lets businesses track activity through their website forms and materials, etc.
How to Choose Between NetSuite CRM and HubSpot
Depending on the industry you’re in, both options are great and offer benefits that streamline activities and also add insight into the sales process.
Let’s look at each option with respect to a few core business activities that most companies follow:
Sales
When it comes to sales and sales forecasting, both NetSuite CRM and HubSpot offer a dashboard of options that include the trajectory of a lead and its score. KPIs such as these offer full visibility into a potential lead’s probability of becoming a win.
While NetSuite lets you customize your dashboards a little more, HubSpot’s platform is considered more user-friendly and adds a clearer value to any deals that are currently in progress across different pipelines. There are also templates available for Sales to build out deals and they can link their own calendars to quickly set up meetings with prospects.
Customer Success
NetSuite CRM actually offers full customer service management (known as CSM) with access granted to anyone within your organization that deals with customers. This can range from Sales teams to Sales Support and Service divisions. Customers’ details can be updated in real time, so you can ensure your teams are effectively serving your clients, with plenty of cross-selling opportunities.
As expected, HubSpot offers tools to help you handle customer requests, preferences and profiles as well. What’s more interesting about HubSpot is the support they offer you as a customer.
Even HubSpot’s most basic offering includes access to community support, chats, helpful how-to blogs and white papers that you can refer to at any moment.
Email Marketing
Email marketing using the NetSuite platform makes it simple to track the path or activity that took a buyer to the point at which they’re ready to purchase. This allows you to easily create a lead profile and qualify them accordingly so the right Sales team member can reach out to them.
HubSpot goes a little further as it ties in the element of content marketing. With alerts set up so you will know when a lead engages with an email or clicks on content, it’s easy to know exactly what they’re interested in. Again, similar to NetSuite, a member of the Sales team can use this insight to approach a lead with the relevant marketing materials in hand.
Also, HubSpot lets you build campaigns using templates they offer based on your past preferences and usage.
NetSuite or HubSpot?
When it comes to picking a CRM platform, there is no clear-cut answer nor is there a perfect solution. As we’ve seen here, for a business that heavily relies on their content to drive leads, HubSpot is an obvious choice. But we can’t discount the benefits of NetSuite, particularly for an organization that currently uses it as their main ERP platform, as add-ons could lead to discounts on overall NetSuite pricing.
Consider this: integrating HubSpot to NetSuite. Learn more about Why Integrating HubSpot to NetSuite is Vital for Business Growth
Request More Info From an Expert
