1985 Called. It Wants Its CRM Back (SalesForce)

Warning: This is a hot take, and alpha dog sales teams are not going to agree with me here. I have not kept up with Salesforce since I did the migration from Salesforce to HubSpot at a company with 100+ people in 2023. I have been an admin for both systems at scale, so my opinion is fully formed.

Opening Salesforce is similar to getting handed a filing cabinet when you really needed for a search bar. Every click you're trying to get to takes three in Salesforce, and every report is a prelude into a twenty-minute conversation about whether the report is even pulling the correct data to begin with.

Although, I am sure Salesforce has made improvements since I last cared enough to check, but I highly doubt the additions of "Lightning" and AI tools have made it any more usable.

Salesforce: Built for a Sales Culture Worth Leaving

There was a period in sales where complexity was a status symbol, where the bigger your tech stack and the more certified your admin, the more serious your operation looked to anyone evaluating it from the outside. Salesforce was built for that exact moment and everyone bought in hard.

Fields pile up year over year because removing things feels like pulling a wire in a circuit that could destroy the entire CRM at any moment.

Teams leave the old fields, and then those teams hire new people who ask what the fields mean and get three different answers from three people who have each been around long enough to believe they're right. Workarounds from 2020 are still sitting in the system because understanding them means tracking down whoever built them, and that person left in 2021. You pull a report and twenty minutes go to explaining what it's counting, if the filter matches last quarter's configuration, and whether the number is even right to begin with.

Salesforce keeps the history and the activity, but it doesn't tell you the full story.

When every seat is a line item, visibility into the data (and CRM) becomes a budgeting decision instead of an operational one, and reps who need to see across deals can't because the approval conversation kept getting pushed down the priority list.

So teams build spreadsheets on the side, keep their own trackers, and the CRM becomes the official record of a process nobody understands whilst no one is properly owning at the same time.

To be fair, if you are a global conglomerate with 5,000 reps and a custom-coded revenue engine that requires deep, granular permissions, Salesforce’s complexity is your exact armor. But for the mid-market team? That armor is costly, dead weight.

HubSpot Is the Right Move, Done Wrong by Most Teams

HubSpot is worth the move. You get a clean, simple interface, logic without needing 100 certifications, and onboarding that doesn't require a six-week implementation timeline to get all the reps up to speed.

In comparison, HubSpot is a breath of fresh air, and so much easier to use.

You can see your full pipeline, build workflows, and pull a report in half the time it takes in Salesforce.

Most teams treat the migration as the end point and skip everything that makes the CRM worth having.

With vague deal stages copied straight over because defining them meant scheduling a two-hour alignment meeting with leadership that does not have the bandwidth.

After duplicate fields get created constantly because creating is faster than checking whether a field already exists under a slightly different name, and the pipeline got built around the org chart instead of how buyers move through decisions.

Six months in, they had 38 workflows and nobody could tell you which ones are still active or what they were doing to the data.

HubSpot is easy to build in, and that ease is what gets teams into trouble at scale because in Salesforce everything is drag and 10x harder for no reason.

While HubSpot removes unnecessary friction entirely so automations multiply, lifecycle stages stack across functions. In six months, you have a system full of decisions nobody helped to build correctly, but everyone loudly complains about.

CRM Setup Decisions That Come Back To Haunt You

Deal stages rarely ever get finalized before the build begins because getting everyone aligned means two hours in a meeting that no one has time or patience for until it becomes a monster.

Lifecycle ownership never properly gets assigned because marketing claims it from one side and sales claims it from the other and ops runs both versions in parallel because picking a lane means telling someone they're wrong.

Lead status means something different in every function and on every team, so every automation sitting on top of it is running on competing definitions. Naming conventions never get enforced because something more urgent always takes priority and always will.

Every workflow in your HubSpot portal is a snapshot of whatever the process looked like the week someone had time to build it.

What a Tight CRM System Looks Like

A tight system means one team owns the lifecycle stage. You get everyone to agree on a single definition way before anyone touches the workflows.

Fields shouldn't just be 'suggested' in a Notion doc that nobody reads; they need to be enforced at the property level. You set permissions based on what a role actually needs instead of what’s easiest to toggle on day one. And finally, your reporting has to be tied to locked-down definitions from the start, rather than scrambling to build dashboards around whatever messy data happened to be at the time.

A good HubSpot consultant makes sure critical conversations happen before go-live, and not six months cleaning up after the fact.

Teams leave Salesforce because making updates in the system is like filing paperwork in a building from 1987 when you need a modern alternative.

If you love a heavy, clunky tool, there's no changing your mind.

With HubSpot, you get a cleaner interface. Getting the tool right is the easy part, and getting the setup right is much harder.

Need help migrating from Salesforce to HubSpot? Selkire's been there. We can help.