If you’ve ever wrapped up a support call with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement formerly (Pardot) or HubSpot feeling like you’ve just fought a losing battle—and ended up with a migraine for your efforts—you’re not alone.
For years, these platforms have set the standard for what CRM and Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) tools can do. A CRM is designed to manage customer interactions, sales pipelines, and client relationships—helping businesses track leads, follow-ups, and revenue opportunities. In contrast, a MAP focuses on automating marketing efforts, nurturing leads, and executing multi-channel campaigns across email, social media, and ads. While CRMs empower sales teams, MAPs give marketers the ability to engage prospects at scale, ensuring a smooth handoff between marketing and sales. Ideally, these two systems work together, creating a streamlined customer journey. But when platform support falters, businesses are left grappling with disjointed workflows, inefficient lead management, and frustration at every turn.
As these tools have grown more complex, their user support systems seem to have fallen behind. They’ve built their reputations on innovation, scalability, and the promise of seamless customer experiences. But recently, the experience has been anything but seamless.
Instead of clarity and solutions, you’re left with slow responses, surface-level fixes, and the nagging feeling that the tools you depend on have outgrown their ability to care for their users. The result? Frustration, wasted cycles, and the occasional headache. While platforms like Klayivo, Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign offer alternatives, their limitations make Salesforce and HubSpot the primary choices for enterprise-level businesses.
Let’s dive into how this is playing out with two of the biggest names in the industry.
Salesforce: A Maze of Transfers and Outdated Advice
Salesforce has been a cornerstone of the CRM world for years. Its tools are powerful, flexible, and—when everything works—highly effective. But when something goes wrong, the cracks in their infrastructure become glaringly obvious.
Take Pardot, or as it’s now called, Account Engagement. Salesforce acquired the Pardot MAP in 2013, so you’d think they’d have had plenty of time to integrate it seamlessly. Sadly, launching a support request feels like stepping into a labyrinth. First, you’re routed to a general support team that doesn’t specialize in Pardot. You explain your issue, wait on hold, and then get transferred—only to explain the problem all over again.
When you finally connect with the right team, the “support” often falls short of expectations. Case in point: a recent issue with email rendering in Outlook. After navigating the support maze, the “solution” provided was a blog post titled “Account Engagement emails don’t display properly in Outlook.” Last updated: February 2023, and doesn’t address my problem of poorly rendered preview text.
Providing a generic blog post instead of an actionable resolution reduces trust and places unnecessary burden on users. Worse, the content provided several vague options for what might be causing an issue, effectively shifting the burden back to the user to troubleshoot. It’s not just frustrating—it’s baffling that a company as established as Salesforce can feel so disconnected from the real-world challenges their users face. Moreover, a quick search says Outlook supports over 3 million customers with roughly 37.83% of market share, how has this problem not been addressed yet?
HubSpot: From Collaborative Partner to Frustrating Gatekeeper
HubSpot has long been praised as the user-friendly alternative to platforms like Salesforce. It never had the CRM horsepower of Salesforce, but it never claimed to. For years, it was the go-to for its intuitive marketing automation tools, transparent pricing, and support that felt like a partnership.
But recently, working with HubSpot support has felt less like collaboration and more like a drawn-out interrogation. Take a recent issue with automated source tracking as an example. Instead of diving in to diagnose the root cause, responses felt surface-level and detached. Even worse, each reply took 24 hours or more, stretching what should have been a quick fix into an unnecessary ordeal, spanning multiple weeks.
More troubling, HubSpot support has taken on an increasingly accusatory tone. Users are frequently asked to “prove” their issues by providing extensive logs, screenshots, or recreations of the problem. While this might make sense as a last step, it’s now become the first step, creating a tedious game of back-and-forth emails that drains time and energy.
This shift—from proactive and insightful to defensive and procedural—is especially disappointing for a platform that once positioned itself as the ally of marketing and sales teams. When support becomes a bottleneck, it undermines the very efficiency HubSpot was designed to deliver—and that’s a dangerous place for any SaaS provider to land.
The Bigger Picture: When Support Fails
Salesforce and HubSpot are supposed to represent the gold standard in Martech, dominating the industry with their robust tools, expansive features and market share. But as their products have grown more complex, their support systems seem to have fallen behind. And that gap isn’t just inconvenient—it’s costly.
These platforms aren’t cheap. As someone who’s been involved in negotiating deals for these tools time and time again, I can tell you firsthand that businesses invest heavily in these solutions. That investment isn’t just in the software itself—it’s in the promise of a seamless experience, backed by expert support. But when support falls short, the value equation starts to crumble.
Recently, both of these MAP giants have introduced a troubling new trend. When their internal teams fail to resolve an issue, they’ve suggested bringing in third-party consultants—at an additional cost—to “help” solve the problem.
That raises uncomfortable questions. If the platforms themselves can’t solve the issues, why should I trust their consultants? Are these third parties cutting deals with the MAPs to profit off users’ frustrations? And worse, is poor support being leveraged as a revenue stream—forcing users to pay more to resolve problems that shouldn’t exist in the first place?
A company essentially giving up on providing real support is a red flag, especially when users have already invested so heavily for the platform.
Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud Account Engagement pricing tiers show how much businesses are investing.
Salesforce Support Plans
And extra for premier support, which is priced casually at 30% of net license fees. Looking at you, Salesforce, 30% of $4,400, is still $15,840 annually and for $15K I’d expect more than an unrelated blog from 2 years ago. And I expect to be routed to the correct team each time, but I haven’t yet reached the correct support team on the initial ticket request.
For businesses, the true worth of a MAP isn’t in what it can do on its best days, but in how quickly and effectively issues are resolved on its worst. Every unresolved ticket, delayed response, or surface-level “fix” adds friction to teams that are already stretched thin. Customers are 2.4 times more likely to stick with a brand when their problems are solved quickly (Forrester). Delayed responses and surface-level fixes don’t just frustrate users; they actively harm customer loyalty and retention.
Salesforce and HubSpot have the resources, talent, and market dominance to fix these problems. But the solution requires treating support as a non-negotiable part of their value proposition—not as a cost center or an afterthought. Direct, knowledgeable assistance should be the baseline. Anything less isn’t just bad for users; it’s bad business.
