HubSpot vs ForceManager (Sage Sales Management): which to choose

If your sales team spends its days on the road visiting customers, ForceManager (now called Sage Sales Management) is a CRM that has been thoughtfully built for mobile. But if you also need to generate leads, run marketing, handle after-sales service and measure the whole revenue cycle on one database, HubSpot is the more complete option and the one that scales best for most growing companies.

In this comparison we look at both in detail: what each does well, where each falls short and when it makes sense to stay where you are.

What is ForceManager, and why is it now called Sage Sales Management?

ForceManager started life in Barcelona as a CRM for sales teams who work away from the office. Its promise has always been clear: reps log visits, contacts and opportunities from their phone without endless forms, and the sales director sees team activity in real time.

Sage acquired the company and, since 1 February 2025, the product has been sold as Sage Sales Management. According to the vendor, the change was a visual rebrand: features, customer data and integrations stayed the same, and the product can still be bought on its own, without other Sage software.

Its typical customer is a B2B company with a field sales force: distribution, manufacturing, food, building materials or pharma, with reps who manage an account portfolio, take orders and need routes and follow-up.

What is HubSpot?

HubSpot is a customer platform built on a shared CRM, Smart CRM. On top of it run Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, Content Hub, Data Hub and Revenue Hub, plus the Breeze AI layer. They all share the same database of contacts, companies, deals and tickets.

Sales Hub is the product that competes head-on with Sage Sales Management. The difference is that in HubSpot the rep sees, on the same record, what the customer has done on your website, which emails they have opened and whether they have open issues with support.

HubSpotSage Sales Management

FocusMarketing, sales and serviceB2B field sales

Mobile appComplete, for every teamIts core strength

Routes and check-inVia marketplace appsBuilt in

Marketing automationNative in Marketing HubNot its focus

Customer serviceService HubOutside its scope

AIBreeze across the platformSage Copilot for sales

IntegrationsThousands of apps and an open APISage ERP and a smaller catalogue

CRM and data model

Sage Sales Management organises information around companies, contacts, opportunities and activities (visits, calls, emails), with extra modules for quotes and orders depending on the plan. It is a model designed for account management and it works well as long as your business fits it. Several Capterra reviewers mention that more advanced customisation needs the vendor’s involvement.

HubSpot starts from standard objects (contacts, companies, deals, tickets, products, quotes) and lets you create custom objects on Enterprise, with labelled associations between records. If tomorrow you need to model installations, contracts, visits or points of sale, you can do it inside the CRM itself, with its own properties, permissions and reports, without depending on the vendor.

Which is better for a field sales team?

This is home turf for Sage Sales Management. Its mobile app is designed around the rep: route planner, geolocated check-in, opportunities on a map, built-in email and calendar and, on some plans, visit reports dictated by voice. Users highlight one thing above all: the team genuinely uses it every day.

HubSpot covers the rest of the sales job very well: pipelines with multiple stages and rules, follow-up sequences, meeting links, templates, quotes, forecasting, playbooks and a prospecting workspace. Its mobile app lets reps work their accounts, log calls and notes and receive alerts. What it does not include out of the box is a route planner: if that is essential, you add a specialist marketplace app or a custom extension inside the record.

Before

• Visits logged in a standalone app
• Web leads in another tool
• After-sales by email and spreadsheets
• Reports stitched from three sources

After

• Visit, lead and ticket on one record
• Marketing that feeds the rep’s calendar
• After-sales with tickets and SLAs
• One dashboard for the whole cycle

Does Sage Sales Management do marketing?

It is not what it is built for. Sage Sales Management is designed to manage sales activity and does not offer a marketing automation suite comparable to Marketing Hub. If you want to capture leads on your website, nurture them by email, score them and hand them to sales when they are ready, you will need another tool and an integration.

In HubSpot all of that happens on the same record: forms, landing pages, emails, social campaigns, lead scoring and revenue attribution. The rep visiting a customer knows which content they downloaded and which products they looked at, and marketing knows which campaigns end up as orders.

Customer service and after-sales

Many companies with field sales teams handle after-sales (issues, warranties, returns) by email or phone, outside the CRM. Sage Sales Management is not designed as a help desk, so that information usually lives in a separate system.

With Service Hub, HubSpot adds tickets, a shared email inbox, chat and WhatsApp, a knowledge base, a customer portal, surveys and SLAs. Before every visit the rep can see whether the customer has an open issue, which in recurring B2B sales saves more than one awkward conversation.

Automation and AI: Breeze vs Sage Copilot

Sage Sales Management includes rules and alerts geared to sales activity, with more automation options on higher plans. Its AI, Sage Copilot, is focused on the rep: it turns a spoken visit report into a structured summary and suggests next steps, such as creating an order or booking a meeting. It is useful and very well targeted at field work.

HubSpot takes a cross-functional approach to AI. Breeze Assistant helps you write, summarise and prepare for meetings; Breeze agents research accounts for prospecting, answer customer questions from your knowledge base or keep your data clean. And HubSpot workflows automate processes across contacts, companies, deals, tickets and custom objects, with branches, delays and, on higher editions, custom code.

Reporting and sales forecasting

Sage Sales Management reports are good at what they measure: team activity, visits, targets and how opportunities progress. It gives a clear picture of the field team.

HubSpot goes a step further because it joins data across departments: you can see which campaign generated the lead, how many visits it took to close, how long it took to convert and whether it led to support issues afterwards. Leadership dashboards, forecasting and revenue attribution all come from the same source, with no exporting to Excel.

Integrations, ERP and API

This is one of Sage Sales Management’s strongest arguments: native integration with Sage 50 and Sage 200, with quote and order modules depending on the ERP. If your whole business runs on Sage, that is a real advantage. Outside that environment its integration catalogue is smaller, and many connections go through platforms such as Zapier or through its API.

HubSpot has one of the largest integration marketplaces on the market and an open, well-documented API. It connects to ERPs (Sage included, through connectors or a custom build), invoicing, telephony, WhatsApp, e-commerce and BI tools. We see it every day in our HubSpot integrations work: what matters is deciding which system owns each piece of data before connecting anything.

Which is easier to use and adopt?

Both are quick to learn. Sage Sales Management has a very gentle learning curve for field reps, and that is its great strength: daily adoption. HubSpot is also known for its ease of use, and marketing, sales and service teams commonly adopt it within a few weeks with role-based training.

The difference shows over time. As the company grows, HubSpot spares you from training people on three different tools and maintaining integrations between them: everyone works in the same interface with the same data.

Implementation and total cost of ownership

Sage Sales Management is sold per user, with tiered plans and add-ons depending on the features you need, and it offers a free trial. You can check the details on its official pricing page (Spanish site). HubSpot has free CRM tools and Starter, Professional and Enterprise editions for each hub, licensed per seat and, for marketing, by contacts; see HubSpot’s official pricing.

To compare properly, add up everything you will need over the next few years: for Sage Sales Management, the marketing tool, help desk and integrations you would have to run separately; for HubSpot, only the hubs and editions you will actually use. Then add admin and development time. For many sales organisations that want to grow, one platform ends up cheaper to run than three connected tools.

Support, community and partners

Sage Sales Management provides direct support and a customer success team, and users rate the service well. Its community and partner network are smaller and closely tied to the Sage ecosystem.

HubSpot offers a free academy, a huge community and a global network of certified partners. Vexco is a HubSpot Diamond Solutions Partner, rated 4.9/5 in HubSpot’s directory, with an in-house team of 19 people across Barcelona and Dubai where consultants and developers work side by side.

Security, GDPR and EU data hosting

Both vendors work with European customers and offer data processing agreements. If data residency is critical for you, ask Sage for the hosting and sub-processor documentation for Sage Sales Management. HubSpot lets you host your account in its European Union data centre and provides consent management, team-based permissions, audit logs and single sign-on on higher editions.

HubSpot vs Sage Sales Management comparison table

When might Sage Sales Management make sense?

It is a good choice in these cases:

• Your team is mostly field sales and the value lies in routes, visits and orders from a phone.
• You run Sage 50 or Sage 200 and want the vendor’s own integration.
• Marketing and after-sales are handled elsewhere and you have no plans to bring them into the CRM.
• You want a tightly scoped tool that reps adopt with almost no training.

If you are still weighing up alternatives, our HubSpot vs Salesforce comparison may also help.

Verdict: why HubSpot wins

Sage Sales Management is a great field CRM. But for most companies that want to grow, HubSpot is the better investment, for these reasons:

1. One platform. Marketing, sales, service and content on the same CRM, with no syncing between tools.
2. Demand and sales connected. Web leads reach the rep’s calendar already qualified, and you know which campaigns generate orders.
3. AI across the whole cycle. Breeze helps with prospecting, sales, service and data quality, not just the visit report.
4. Ecosystem and integrations. A huge marketplace and an open API to connect your ERP, invoicing or telephony, whatever your stack.
5. Leadership reporting. Dashboards that combine marketing, sales and service from a single source of truth.
6. Lower total cost over time. Fewer tools to license, integrate and administer.

How to migrate from ForceManager to HubSpot

HubSpot does not list Sage Sales Management among the apps supported by its automatic transfer tool, so the migration is done with exports, the API and careful mapping. These are the steps we follow:

1. 01Data and process audit
2. 02Object and property mapping
3. 03Clean-up and deduplication
4. 04Test migration
5. 05Cut-over and team training

• Objects. Companies and contacts map to their standard objects; opportunities become deals in a pipeline; quotes and orders become HubSpot quotes, orders or a custom object, depending on how you use them.
• Properties. Review custom fields before recreating them: it is the moment to drop the ones nobody fills in and standardise dropdown values.
• History. Visits, calls and notes are migrated as activities associated with the company, contact and deal, keeping their date and owner. Visit geolocation can be stored in properties if you need it for reporting.
• Integrations. If you are connected to Sage 50 or Sage 200, decide which system owns customers, products and orders and rebuild the integration with HubSpot before cut-over.
• Typical pitfalls. Deactivated users who still own accounts, duplicate companies with the same tax ID and routes that nobody redefines in the new tool.

At Vexco we have migrated companies to HubSpot from Salesforce, Odoo and Clientify, ERP integrations included, and we run every CRM migration in phases, testing on real data before cut-over.

• Comparison
• ForceManager
• Sage Sales Management
• Sales Hub