George CollierWe get asked this a lot, usually by a business that has been on HubSpot or Salesforce for a few years and is paying more each year for a system the team works around. Here's how I'd decide.
Under about 15 staff, or if you sell in a standard way, use HubSpot or Pipedrive. They're cheaper and you can be live this week.
Salesforce makes sense for large sales teams with a full-time admin. A custom CRM makes sense when the CRM has to run more than sales, like quotes in your own units, jobs, stock or orders, and per-seat fees stop everyone from having access.
What HubSpot and Salesforce cost
List prices at the time of writing, in US dollars:
- HubSpot Sales Hub Professional is about $90 a seat a month on an annual plan, or $100 monthly, plus a one-off $1,500 onboarding fee. Enterprise is $150 a seat, with $3,500 onboarding.
- Salesforce starts at $25 a user a month for the Starter Suite and $100 for Pro Suite. Larger editions run from $195 to $550 a user, and premier support adds 30% of your licence fees.
For a 30-person team, that's $2,700 to $3,000 a month on HubSpot Professional, $3,000 on Salesforce Pro Suite, or $5,850 on a $195 Salesforce edition. That's before the consultant who sets it up, the integrations that keep it in sync with your other tools, and the other tools themselves.
Where off-the-shelf CRMs are strong
HubSpot and Salesforce are mature products. They have mobile apps, hundreds of integrations, decent reporting, and a big pool of people who already know how to use them. If your sales process is a pipeline of deals with line-item quotes, they'll do the job well and you shouldn't build your own.
Where they stop fitting
The problems usually show up in the same places:
- Your quotes aren't a simple list of products. If you price by measurements, configurations or units like square yards and linear feet, the CRM's quote builder can't do the maths, so someone does it in a spreadsheet.
- You run several pipelines that work differently, like retail, trade and commercial, and they don't share stages.
- The work carries on after the deal closes. Jobs, orders, stock and invoices live in other tools, so the CRM goes stale and staff copy data between systems.
- Per-seat pricing means you ration who gets a login, so the operations team works from exports and spreadsheets.
Floor Authority hit the first three. Flooring is sold by the box, the square yard and the linear foot, and they run separate pipelines for retail, new-build, commercial and wholesale work. Two off-the-shelf systems couldn't handle it.
What a custom CRM looks like
A custom CRM has your pipelines, your stages and your quote rules, and it's connected to the systems that come after the sale, like scheduling, purchasing and Xero. Everyone in the business gets access, because there are no seat fees.
With managed software it's one of the systems we build and run for a flat $6,000£4,500€5,300 a month, alongside quoting, reporting and whatever else the business needs. We import your data from HubSpot, Salesforce or spreadsheets, and you can run both side by side until the team is happy to switch.
| Compared on | HubSpot | Salesforce | Custom CRM |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Per seat | Per user, plus support | Flat monthly price |
| Time to go live | Days | Weeks to months, often with a consultant | Within 30 days |
| Quotes | Line items, quoting add-ons | Separate CPQ product | Your units and pricing rules |
| After the sale | Separate tools and integrations | Separate tools or custom development | Built in |
| Changes | You configure it | An admin or consultant | We build and release weekly |
| Best for | Small teams, standard sales | Large sales teams with an admin | 15+ staff where sales feeds operations |
How to decide
Count how many tools your team touches between a lead coming in and an invoice going out, and how many hours a week go on copying between them. If the answer is one or two tools and not much copying, stay on HubSpot or Pipedrive. If it's five tools, a few spreadsheets and a person whose job is mostly keeping them in sync, that's the point where a custom system pays for itself.
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