Signs You’re Outgrowing HubSpot

Feeling frustrated because you can’t easily scale or customize HubSpot?  Here are some telltale signs you’re outgrowing HubSpot and should upgrade to Marketo.

>> Related: A Scorecard for Comparing Marketo, Hubspot, and Jahia <<

You need more powerful scoring

Out of the box, HubSpot’s lead score is set by filters.  But those filters are super limited:

• You can score based on number of times something has been done, OR the recency of it, but not both.  For example, you can’t filter for “visits 3+ pages within the last day”.
• You also can’t trigger off things like Salesforce campaign membership, or campaign status.
• HubSpot also doesn’t allow you to deprecate scores, for say subtracting points as time passes.
• Nor can you reset scores based on triggers like Recycle.
• You’re limited to 100 score filters.  You’d be surprised how quickly/often you hit the limit.

In short, if you’re looking to closely track surges of behavior, aggregate activity into an Account-wide score, create unique scores for each product, or reset/penalize scores, you’re outgrowing HubSpot.

You’re trying to scale

If you’re operating at scale, having campaign templates, global forms, and global workflows helps cut your admin overhead.  But HubSpot has no concepts of “programs” that combine landing pages, emails, and automation.

Marketing is mostly repeated tactics.  Every webinar has a form page, a thank you page, some invite emails, a webinar partner that actually processes unique meeting links, reminder emails, and then the automation to drop registrants/attendees into Salesforce campaigns with the appropriate status.

• In Marketo, you can bundle the entire suite into a program template, and then just clone and adjust some settings for each webinar in ~10 minutes.
• But in HubSpot, you’re building each of these pieces from scratch, and probably tracking all the components in a spreadsheet.  It’s common for HubSpot webinar builds to be 35 steps and take at least 3 hours!  It’s not a dealbreaker if you run one webinar a month, but it’s really a problem if you’re running two a week.

Similarly, these program templates allow MOPs admins to decentralize the build.  Instead, admins can give program templates to field and marketing managers, train them thoroughly on the small setting changes, and then go tackle something more strategic.

You’re running into workflow limits

For Enterprise users of HubSpot, you can only have 1000 total active workflows.  If you’re running a ton of web content, or really trying to stretch the limits of scoring, you’ll literally hit the ceiling.

In Marketo, I’m not aware of any such limit.  And Marketo automatically deactivates things that haven’t run for six months, so it’s self-pruning.

You want custom funnel data

HubSpot generally locks “the complicated stuff” away.  But if your team is savvy, you may be itching to customize things like your funnel. HubSpot’s out-of-the box funnel is inflexible and simplistic. You can build your own (using inferior workflows), but you can’t turn off the out-of-the box stuff.  So on top of your custom funnel, HubSpot will continue setting “became an MQL” date, “became an SQL” date, etc.  You can imagine how miserable the reporting gets.

Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose

Of course, Marketo isn’t magic.  You need a talented admin to create the programs and pull all the levers.  So be sure to weigh Marketo’s cons:

• Marketo has an intimidating UX, and isn’t intuitive for casual users.  For example, there isn’t a visual flow chart for workflows:

• Marketo always creates a Lead (not a Contact) for new records.  There are ways/tools to solve this, but it adds complexity.
• Controlling the sync with Salesforce is more admin-heavy.
• Creating email and landing pages is just a pain in the ass (and so is integrating tools like Unbounce).