4 CRM’s That Are Leading the Way

We all know that excellent customer relations are a crucial factor in fostering new business and more importantly, retaining business.

When a company starts, they usually rely on sheets to record leads, contacts, activities, and any other details. However, as the company grows and scales, you need to not only own your data (IP) but also organise it in a meaningful way. Every company needs to start considering a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software. No one enjoys the endless spreadsheets that are currently filling up your hard drive or cloud service.

A CRM is a place where your business can consolidate all its’ daily activities with customers in one place. This means that you can get a bird’s eye view of all your customer interactions and in turn, know where each relationship lies within the sales funnel. It allows you to centralise all the data on a customer so that you can pick up from where anyone else left off (even if they are not in your division/team).

There is a host of different CRM software to choose from out there, and they all offer varying functionality. In the interest of saving you time and helping you find a top-class solution for your business, here are four CRM’s that are leading the way today.

Hubspot

HubSpot is one of the heavy hitters in CRM software. This easy to use CRM platform offers a full stack of software for marketing, sales and customer service. Today, over 78,700 total customers in more than 120 countries use HubSpot’s award-winning software, services, and support to transform the way they engage and delight customers.

With a varied offering including; Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, and a powerful free CRM, HubSpot gives companies the tools they need to scale and grow efficiently and effectively. What I particularly like about it is the fusion of outbound with inbound marketing leads into labels that teams can organise. It also doubles down nicely as a sales-only tool — especially with email and document tracking (paid).

The free Hubspot CRM software gives you everything you need to organise, track, and build better relationships with leads and customers. It will also enable you to forecast revenue and report on revenue sources, making it unique with its’ all-in-one approach to CRM.

Pipedrive

Pipedrive is a deal-driven sales management tool aimed at smaller teams. It visualises your sales pipeline and helps to make sure important activities and conversations don’t get dropped.

It also supports built-in forecasting, integrations with other software such as Google Apps, MailChimp and Zapier. Today, Pipedrive has over 90,000 customers in 179 countries with about $24 Billion in closed deals. Needless to say that it is a valued tool for its’ customers.

Pipedrive offers three simple tiers to its’ customers, which include; an Essential tier which costs $12.50 per user per month billed annually (or $15 month-month), an Advanced tier priced at $24.90 per month per user billed annually (or $29 month-month) and finally the Enterprise tier which costs $49.90 per user per month billed annually (or $59 month-month).

Each tier will offer a certain amount of cloud storage per user. The Essential tier gives each user 2Gb of cloud storage while the Advanced tier offers 5Gb of cloud storage per user. Lastly, the Enterprise tier gives larger companies 100Gb of cloud storage per user.

Overall a great tool if your organisation is still in its growth stage, and has a small to the medium sales team.

Salesforce

Salesforce is a customer success platform that helps businesses of all sizes accelerate sales, automate tasks and make smarter decisions so you can connect with your customers in a whole new way while growing your business faster.

The world is changing and this ever-evolving CRM gives you the ability to navigate uncertain times with deep customer insights and impressive work from home capabilities. Today Salesforce has over 150,000 companies both big and small, using their platform to scale and grow their respective businesses.

There are various offerings within the Salesforce platform itself, including; Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, among others. Each offering aims to solve a need within your business. Sales cloud keeps your team up to date with the necessary information needed to close deals, while simultaneously giving them the ability to have transparency across the business and sell as a team.

Service Cloud gives your business the ability to deliver world-class customer service by providing you with the tools you need to rapidly respond to customer needs on any channel, even from home. Exceptional customer service, more times than not, results in retaining customers and encouraging repeat business.

Overall, if your organisation is SaaS/BaaS based and needs to manage APIs with payments — this is your best solution.

Nimble

Nimble is the simple, smart CRM built for Office 365 and G Suite teams. It does all the work by integrating with productivity apps such as inboxes and calendars, which delivers a streamlined user experience.

Nimble gives instant insights on people and companies by automatically building live profiles on anyone. Today over 140,000 professionals use Nimble to nurture customer relationships, leverage social insights and ultimately sell smarter.

With features such as; sales intelligence, email tracking and pipeline management, it turns qualifying your leads into a simple and easy to understand process with minimal input and maximum value. Which means that your team can focus on what’s important, which is driving sales and making sure that customers are receiving the best experience your business can offer.

Nimble is an excellent platform for the smaller — medium sales teams amongst us.

Conclusion

Every organisation that drives sales and wants to understand how to improve revenue needs a CRM. It is the heartbeat of your sales stack and the essential tool for your team.

If you already have make sure you experiment with others or its extended features to see what more it can give. If you don’t have one, now is the time to invest. Your data forms part of your company’s total value, and tracking past, present and future revenue is a significant part of that.