Leaving Marketo or Salesforce in 2027? Why RevOps Leaders Are Moving to HubSpot
Seems like there are a lot of people out there considering leaving Marketo and/or Salesforce next year. Any RevOps leader who's got some battle scars knows such a transformation is no small task, but the pain seems to be reaching the point a lot of folks are getting serious about it.
I hear it on calls every week now. It's not one loud complaint. It's a slow pile up of renewal quotes, admin headaches, and features that never quite showed up. So let's talk about why it's happening, what the alternatives look like, and what it really takes to make the move without blowing up your revenue engine.
Why people may leave Marketo
Lack of innovation since Adobe acquisition.
Interface and complexity means you need rare and expensive skillsets to operate it
Intriguing new options on the market. (I'm looking at you Phave)
Adobe bought Marketo in 2018. Since then, the roadmap has felt more like maintenance than momentum. The core engine still works. Smart campaigns, tokens, program hierarchies, all still there. But very little of what's shipped in the last few years has changed how a marketing ops team works day to day.
The talent problem is real too. A strong Marketo admin is hard to find and expensive to keep. When that person leaves, a lot of teams find out their whole lead flow lives in one person's head. That's not a platform. That's a liability.
Add in Marketo pricing that keeps creeping up at renewal, and the math starts to look different. If you're paying premium prices for a tool only one or two people can run, you're not getting a force multiplier. You're getting a bottleneck.
To be clear, Marketo is still a serious tool, and we still do a lot of Marketo work. For some teams it's the right call. If you're weighing it against other enterprise options, our Marketo vs Eloqua guide breaks that down.
Why people may leave Salesforce
Agentforce (or whatever they are calling it this week) has been a complete flop, very few have gotten value from it.
High price tag and increasingly aggressive renewal tactics. (they are turning into oracle in the worst way)
Interface is still bad and no one has ever liked using it
Agentforce was supposed to be the big unlock. In practice, most teams we talk to are still trying to figure out what problem it solves for them. The pricing model keeps shifting, the use cases are fuzzy, and getting it working well requires clean data most orgs simply don't have. We dug into this in our Agentforce breakdown, and if you want to see how it stacks up against other options, check out our AI agents comparison.
Then there's the bill. Salesforce raised list prices about 9% in 2023 and another 6% in August 2025, and analysts expect another round heading into 2027. That's before the annual escalators baked into a lot of contracts. Renewal conversations have gotten tougher, with more bundling and more pressure to buy things you didn't ask for. If your Salesforce renewal is coming up in 2027, model a higher number than you paid this year.
And the interface. Nobody has ever opened Salesforce and thought, "wow, this is a joy." Low adoption from sellers means bad data. Bad data means bad forecasts. Bad forecasts mean leadership flying blind on revenue.
Salesforce still makes sense for some orgs, especially ones with heavy custom development or complex CPQ needs. As a Salesforce partner, we'll tell you when staying put is the smarter move.
For both platforms, HubSpot is changing the conversation
For both platforms, the rise of HubSpot is another major factor. Over just the last six months HubSpot has gotten dramatically better across their ecosystem. They are now a viable competitor to Salesforce and Marketo for many enterprise companies. HubSpot remains a lot cheaper, is far easier to use, better to work with, and the product is improving far more quickly than Marketo or Salesforce. The lines on the capabilities chart are crossing and people are noticing. We're already seeing HubSpot start to flip these accounts and expect that to accelerate next year.
A few years ago, the HubSpot vs Salesforce debate for enterprise was short. HubSpot was the easy pick for growth stage companies, and Salesforce was where you went when you got serious. That gap has closed fast. Custom objects, stronger permissions, sandboxes, a unified data layer, and AI agents built into the platform mean HubSpot now handles a lot of what used to require a Salesforce build.
The bigger shift is speed. One platform for marketing, sales, and service means one source of truth from lead to cash. Your team can actually use it. Your reports actually match. And you aren't paying three different specialists to keep three systems talking to each other.
If you want the feature by feature view, our full HubSpot vs Marketo vs Pardot comparison covers it.
Salesforce to HubSpot migration: what it really takes
Here's where the battle scars come in. A CRM migration or a marketing automation migration is not a weekend project. Done right, it's a chance to rebuild your revenue engine on a better foundation. Done wrong, it's six months of broken reports and a sales team that doesn't trust the data.
If you're serious about making the switch, this is what we tell every client:
Start from your renewal date and work backwards. Most failed migrations aren't failed migrations. They're rushed ones. We recently moved a client from Marketo to HubSpot against a hard renewal deadline, and the only reason it worked was a tight plan and a ton of testing.
Clean your data before you move it. Moving dirty data into a new platform just gives you a shinier mess. Dedupe, standardize, and archive first. Our data cleansing team does exactly this.
Rebuild, don't replicate. Your old setup has years of workarounds baked in. Use the move to fix your lead lifecycle, rethink lead scoring, and clean up your campaign hierarchy.
Map every integration and report. Finance, product, support, enrichment tools. If it touches revenue data, it needs a plan. Lose your attribution in the move and you lose the story you tell your board.
Test like your pipeline depends on it. Because it does. Run old and new in parallel, compare outputs, and don't cut over until the numbers match.
This is the work we do every day as a HubSpot implementation partner. Strategy, then hands on keyboards. Results, not decks.
Should you actually leave?
Maybe. Maybe not. The worst move is switching because everyone else is. The second worst is staying because switching sounds hard.
The right answer depends on your team, your data, your contracts, and where your revenue engine is breaking today. Before you sign anything, get an objective look at what's working and what isn't. That's exactly what our RevOps Diagnostic is built for. You'll walk away knowing whether to stay, switch, or fix what you've got.
Are y'all seeing the same trend?
Are y'all seeing the same trend out there?
I'd love to hear what's driving the conversation on your team. Drop a comment, send me a note, or check out some of our success stories to see what a well run migration looks like. And if 2027 is the year you make the move, let's make sure it's the last migration you ever have to do. Get in touch here to start the conversation.
About Hyperscayle
Hyperscayle is a revenue operations consulting and implementation firm. We partner with growth-stage and enterprise organizations to help them build, optimize, and scale their RevOps systems — including Marketo, Salesforce, HubSpot, and the full marketing automation ecosystem.
We provide both strategy and execution for your RevOps projects, designing business process and technical solutions, then putting hands on keyboards to implement them in your marketing, sales and finance systems. We’ve solved RevOps challenges across multiple industries, with a focus on SaaS, Manufacturing, Finance and Healthcare.
