Which is the right system to support you B2B sales growth? Let’s compare the two biggest players with a newer entrant, Attio.
Choosing a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is one of the most important decisions for any B2B sales team. It’s the engine that drives your outreach, manages your relationships, and ideally, fuels your growth.
But navigating the vast landscape of options – from established giants like Salesforce to user-friendly powerhouses like HubSpot, and innovative newcomers like Attio – can feel overwhelming. The sheer volume of features, pricing models, and promises can leave you feeling stuck, unsure which path to take.
At Sideways, our mission is simple: to make life easier for people selling B2B. We see so many businesses trying to sell with systems that are a mess and messaging that doesn’t quite hit the mark.
This guide isn’t about telling you what to buy or declaring one CRM definitively “better” than the others. Instead, it’s about offering a clear, considered, and genuine perspective to help you cut through the noise and find the right fit for your unique sales process, team structure, and growth aspirations.
Having spent considerable time immersed in the B2B sales technology space, and as an expert partner with Attio, we’ve had the privilege of seeing these systems in action across a variety of businesses. Here’s our take on where each of these popular CRMs truly shines for B2B sales.
Key Comparison Categories: What Truly Matters for B2B Sales
Let’s break down these three powerful CRMs across the areas that matter most for B2B sales success.
1. Core Philosophy & Target Audience
This is about understanding the DNA of each CRM and who it was fundamentally built to serve.
- Salesforce: At its core, Salesforce is an enterprise-grade platform designed for ultimate customisation and scale. It’s built to handle immense complexity for large, established companies with highly bespoke sales processes, often requiring dedicated IT teams or administrators to unlock its full potential. It’s a “build your own adventure” CRM for those with the resources.
- HubSpot: HubSpot emerged from an inbound marketing philosophy, aiming to be an all-in-one platform for sales, marketing, and customer service. It prioritises user-friendliness and integrates various business functions seamlessly. It’s particularly well-suited for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and those that value an integrated, intuitive approach to their entire customer journey.
- Attio: Attio represents a new generation of CRM, built from the ground up for modern, fast-growing B2B teams. Its philosophy centres on flexibility, powerful data intelligence (especially for relationships), and an AI-native approach to sales. It’s designed to adapt to your evolving workflows rather than forcing you into a rigid structure, making it ideal for dynamic teams, startups, and those who want a CRM that feels truly “native” to how they sell today.
2. Ease of Use & Implementation
Getting a CRM up and running, and then getting your team to actually use it, is paramount.
- Salesforce: The learning curve for Salesforce can be steep. While incredibly powerful, its vast array of features and customisation options mean that effective implementation often requires significant upfront planning, a dedicated administrator, and very often specialist external consultants. It’s a system where you invest heavily in setup before seeing full value.
- HubSpot: Generally, HubSpot is known for its intuitive interface and user-friendly experience. It offers a quicker time to value out-of-the-box, making it a good choice for teams who want to get up and running quickly without extensive technical overhead. Its guided setup processes are a big plus.
- Attio: Designed with modern teams in mind, Attio excels in ease of customisation without code. Its flexible data model allows users to quickly build their own objects and workflows. This often leads to rapid implementation and high user adoption, as the CRM can be made to feel tailor-made to how your team already works, rather than forcing a new process.
3. Customisation & Scalability
How much can the CRM adapt to your unique needs, and how well will it grow with you?
- Salesforce: Salesforce boasts unparalleled customisation capabilities. If you have the technical resources and budget, you can tailor it to almost any conceivable sales process or business requirement. Its highest ceiling for bespoke needs means it can scale to the largest, most complex global enterprises.
- HubSpot: While strong for standard B2B sales and marketing processes, HubSpot’s customisation can be more limited, particularly at lower tiers. For highly unique workflows or integrations that aren’t natively supported, it can feel restrictive without investing in higher-priced add-ons or more complex API work.
- Attio: Attio’s flexible data model is a significant strength here. It allows users to create custom objects, attributes, and relationships on the fly, making it highly adaptable to evolving sales processes. This means it scales by adapting to your specific needs as they change, rather than requiring you to conform to a rigid, pre-defined structure. It’s built for agility.
4. Data Management & Intelligence
In B2B sales, good data is gold. How effectively does each CRM help you manage and leverage it?
- Salesforce: Salesforce offers robust data management capabilities, but effectively leveraging data often requires significant manual input, careful data governance, and the setup of specific enrichment tools. It excels at storing and structuring data you put in, but less so at proactively enriching it.
- HubSpot: HubSpot provides good contact and company management, with some built-in data enrichment features. However, like many CRMs, it can sometimes struggle with duplicate data and requires vigilance to maintain clean records.
- Attio: This is where Attio truly shines for modern B2B sales. It automatically enriches contacts and companies with publicly available data, providing real-time activity streams and powerful relationship intelligence. This means less manual data entry for your sales team and more actionable insights into who knows whom, connection strengths, and real-time interaction logs. It’s designed to bring more relevant data to your fingertips automatically.
5. Automation & Workflows
Efficiency is key. How well do these CRMs automate routine tasks and streamline processes?
- Salesforce: Salesforce offers powerful automation capabilities, primarily through its Flow Builder. However, setting up complex, multi-stage workflows often requires a good understanding of its internal logic and potentially technical expertise or developer involvement.
- HubSpot: HubSpot is renowned for its user-friendly marketing and sales automation features, including email sequences, lead nurturing workflows, and task automation. Its visual workflow builder makes it easy for non-technical users to set up sophisticated automated processes.
- Attio: Attio features a strong, intuitive visual workflow builder focused on eliminating routine tasks and streamlining collaboration within sales teams. It excels at automating things like task creation, record updates, and notifications based on specific triggers. Its emphasis is on freeing up sales reps to focus on selling, and it integrates seamlessly with many popular tools via Zapier for extended automation.
6. AI Features & Benefits
Artificial Intelligence is rapidly reshaping the sales landscape, offering smarter ways to predict, personalise, and prioritise. Here’s how these CRMs are leveraging AI.
- Salesforce: Salesforce’s “Einstein AI” offers a suite of capabilities focused on predictive analytics. This includes AI-driven lead scoring (predicting which leads are most likely to convert), opportunity scoring (forecasting the likelihood of closing deals), and sales forecasting. Einstein also assists with automating activity capture and providing sales insights, helping reps to focus on the most promising opportunities based on data-driven predictions. These features often become more potent with larger datasets and may require specific add-ons or higher tiers to unlock their full potential.
- HubSpot: HubSpot has steadily integrated AI across its platform, primarily through its “AI Assistant” and “Breeze” features. For sales, this translates into AI-powered tools for content generation (drafting personalised emails, sales cadences, social media captions), summarising sales calls, and recommending next steps for deal progression. HubSpot’s AI also assists with lead scoring and can help with automated prospecting, aiming to streamline repetitive tasks and enhance the efficiency of sales and marketing efforts.
- Attio: Attio is positioned as an “AI-native” CRM, meaning AI is woven into its very foundation rather than being an add-on. Its core strength lies in automatic data enrichment and relationship intelligence, where AI proactively pulls in and analyses public data to give you a comprehensive, up-to-date view of contacts and companies. Attio’s AI research agent can automatically qualify leads, find expansion opportunities, and even monitor for churn risks by analysing leadership changes. Its Call Intelligence functionality brings AI insights into live and recorded calls. This proactive, embedded AI aims to significantly reduce manual research and data entry, providing actionable insights that give modern B2B sales teams a competitive edge.
7. Communications Tools & Integration
Effective B2B sales hinge on seamless communication, whether that’s one-to-one outreach or broader marketing campaigns. Understanding how each CRM handles these tools, and where external additions are needed, is key.
- Salesforce: For dedicated marketing automation and sophisticated email campaigns, Salesforce offers Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot). This is a powerful, separate product that integrates deeply with Sales Cloud for lead nurturing, scoring, and comprehensive campaign management. For individual sales outreach, Sales Cloud itself offers email templates and basic logging. For mass marketing emails or advanced social media management beyond individual sales activity, you’ll typically look to integrate external tools or leverage other Salesforce Marketing Cloud modules, often requiring considerable setup and potentially a separate subscription.
- HubSpot: HubSpot’s strength lies in its integrated “Hubs.” Its Marketing Hub provides robust email marketing functionality, landing page builders, blog hosting, and social media scheduling, all designed to work seamlessly with the CRM. Its Sales Hub includes individual sales email sequences, meeting scheduling, and live chat. While HubSpot aims for an all-in-one approach, more advanced or high-volume marketing features may require higher-tier subscriptions, which can increase costs significantly. The benefit is often a unified view and less need for complex integrations.
- Attio: Attio focuses on enabling efficient B2B sales outreach natively through its Sequences feature, which allows you to build personalised, multi-step email and task sequences triggered by prospect signals. This is excellent for individualised sales cadences and follow-ups. For broader marketing campaigns, mass email newsletters, or large-scale social media publishing, Attio typically relies on integration with best-of-breed external tools. Its powerful API and native integrations with platforms like Zapier make it straightforward to connect Attio with dedicated marketing automation platforms (e.g., Mailchimp, Loops.so, ActiveCampaign for higher-volume sequences.) or social media management tools, enabling a two-way data flow to keep your CRM up-to-date.
8. Prospecting & LinkedIn Integration
For B2B sales, proactive prospecting and leveraging platforms like LinkedIn are non-negotiable. How do these CRMs assist with identifying and engaging new leads? It’s also worth noting that for highly specialised prospecting needs, dedicated automation or enrichment tools can often be integrated to extend capabilities across all these platforms.
- Salesforce: Salesforce offers deep integration capabilities through its AppExchange, where you can find various third-party tools for prospecting and LinkedIn integration. While direct, native LinkedIn Sales Navigator integration exists, it often requires specific licences or add-ons. Salesforce’s strength here is its flexibility to integrate with almost any specialised prospecting tool you might use, allowing you to centralise data from various lead sources, though this often means additional setup and costs.
- HubSpot: HubSpot provides direct integration with LinkedIn Sales Navigator (often part of higher-tier Sales Hub subscriptions), allowing sales reps to view LinkedIn profiles directly from CRM records, send InMail, and save leads. It also offers features like a browser extension to add contacts from LinkedIn. HubSpot’s focus is on providing a relatively seamless experience for individual prospecting within its ecosystem, aiming to keep your lead generation efforts connected to your CRM records.
- Attio: Attio’s “AI-native” approach makes it particularly strong for modern prospecting. Its automatic data enrichment frequently pulls in LinkedIn profile context for contacts and companies you add, providing a richer context without manual effort. Attio’s browser extension allows you to effortlessly pull contact and company data directly from LinkedIn profiles and lists into your CRM. Furthermore, its relationship intelligence features can help you identify mutual connections or “warm” intros through your network, making prospecting more strategic and less cold. For building targeted prospect lists from LinkedIn, Attio’s flexibility and data-capture capabilities are a significant advantage.
9. Reporting & Analytics
Can you get the insights you need to understand performance and make strategic decisions?
- Salesforce: Salesforce offers extremely powerful and highly customisable reporting tools. You can slice and dice data in countless ways, but getting to actionable insights often requires a good grasp of its complex reporting interface and the ability to build sophisticated dashboards.
- HubSpot: HubSpot provides excellent out-of-the-box reports, especially for marketing and sales funnel metrics. It’s generally easier to get a quick overview of performance and identify key trends, particularly for those focused on inbound and pipeline progression.
- Attio: While perhaps not as deeply granular as Salesforce’s enterprise reporting capabilities, Attio provides good visibility into your contact database, team activities, and pipeline progression. Its reporting is geared towards actionable B2B sales insights, making it straightforward to track progress and understand relationship dynamics without getting lost in overwhelming data.
10. Pricing Model (and Hidden Costs)
Beyond the listed price, what are the true costs of ownership?
- Salesforce: Salesforce can become very expensive, especially as you add more users, require higher tiers, or need specific add-ons and integrations. Crucially, the cost of expert consultants for implementation, customisation, and ongoing administration often adds a significant hidden layer to the total cost of ownership.
- HubSpot: HubSpot offers various “hubs” (Sales, Marketing, Service, etc.) and a tiered pricing structure. While it starts with a free CRM option, costs can escalate quickly as your contact database grows or you require more advanced features across different hubs.
- Attio: Attio generally offers a more transparent and often more budget-friendly pricing model for small to mid-sized teams, particularly when considering its robust capabilities like automatic data enrichment. Its subscription model is designed to be straightforward, reducing the likelihood of unexpected hidden costs from extensive customisation. Compared to Hubspot and Salesforce, there is a much lower ‘ceiling’ to the potential costs.
Conclusion: Finding Your Best Fit & Next Steps
As you can see, there’s no single “best” CRM for everyone. The “right” choice is ultimately the one that aligns most effectively with your specific B2B sales processes, your team’s size and technical aptitude, and your overall growth strategy.
For a headline summary:
- Choose Salesforce if… You lead a large, established enterprise with deeply complex, highly customised sales processes, and you have dedicated IT resources and a substantial budget ready to invest in a powerful, tailored system. You’re prepared for significant upfront implementation.
- Choose HubSpot if… You’re an SMB or mid-sized company with a strong inbound marketing focus, you prioritise ease of use and integrated marketing and sales functionality, and you want to get up and running quickly with a comprehensive platform without extensive technical overhead.
- Choose Attio if… You’re a modern B2B sales team, a startup, or a growing company that values flexibility and agility. You need a CRM that can adapt to your unique and evolving workflows, you prioritise powerful automatic and AI-powered data enrichment and relationship intelligence, and you’re looking for a user-friendly but robust tool that truly feels like a partner in your sales efforts, without the enterprise complexity and cost. My experience shows that for these types of clients, Attio can make a significant difference to their sales efficiency and insight.
Next Steps
Navigating these choices can still feel like a maze, even with a clearer picture.
If you’re looking for some guidance – whether that involves choosing a new CRM or optimising your current approach – that’s precisely where we can help.
Drop us a message for a free initial consultation where we’ll be happy to answer any questions that are top of mind for you.
