Evaluating Sales CRMs for my startup...
- What Sales CRM are you using?
- What do you love about it?
- What do you hate about it?
- Are you using any integrations or add-ons that you recommend?
- How many people do you have using it (ie: just you or 3 sales reps)?
#crm
We used Base, HubSpot, Pipedrive, and Outreach before finally settling on and LOVING close.com . Pipedrive was probably our 2nd favorite. Outreach was the most expensive.
What do you love about it?
It's very fast, love the custom attribute support, has a great inbox that lets you easily follow-up. Finally, it has an API that is easy to use, so we've been able to automate leads into it. Our sales team and customer success team uses it.
What do you hate about it?
Honestly, nothing really. Perhaps price? It's pricey, we pay $95/per user, but to be honest, it's totally worth it (they have a $25 and $65 tier as well).
Are you using any integrations or add-ons that you recommend?
Gmail, Google Calendar, Calendly, Zapier, and direct integrations.
How many people do you have using it (ie: just you or 3 sales reps)?
9 total. 5 Sales people, 4 customer success people.
They are also actively improving the product. I'd recommend doing the trial. It's pretty easy to get going with it.
Great insight. Thanks Johnny. I'll check them out!
I've been using Streak and now I'm using NetHunt CRM being super happy about it (https://nethunt.com/).
It's a Gmail-based CRM and this is what I like. There is no need to switch between tons of tabs and spend a lot of time to match the client's data. All client and deal-related information is available simply from Gmail. I also like that the system is very customizable and we set it up according to our workflow. We heavily use their email features - bulk email campaigns with clicks and opens tracking, we created our templates and use them constantly (it helps us save money and do not use special emailing tools).
But the most thing I like about is their team as they are open to any kind of communication and really want this system work for our team, they help a lot!
Regarding what I dislike is probably their mobile app as it has limited functionality. This is not something that we often use so we are fine. As far as know they are now working on the updates.
We use direct integration with Gmail and Calendar. Also, we connected Data Studio to track sales stats. With the help of Zapier we connected website forms to get leads with the source channels directly to CRM.
We are the team of 4 people in sales department and 2 people from marketing.
espocrm.
I love the fact it's free and open source, so that I can make all the necessary changes I need, no user limit cap, I can provision a dedicated machine to host it rather than being squeezed on a multi tenant cloud server.
It works beautifully on mobile, no need to install a mobile app. The ability to customise the tools have nearly no limit. (I literally never came across any CRM giving the ability to customize so many aspects of the tool).
There are premium modules, but they are not all that useful, the open source product provides all the CRM features (and actually also things beyond CRM, like accounting).
No integration. If large data need to move from one place to another.. CSV export/import.
Integration I find can be expensive, even if free as systems need to be sync'ed and this has a tendency to never be entirely complete. (e.g mailchimp will have this particular feature that is difficult to integrate to the CRM).
What I hate about it.. the company backing this product could have made it a bit less difficult and more permissive to white label the interface.
The report creation tool is rather basic, it does the job, but for fancy graphs, you got to write your own code, although simple it is expected these days to be able to create report with graphs via a UI. What I realised is that fancy graphs are nearly pointless. End of year fancy reports can be useful for larger teams where a manager want to see a picture of all the data, but this can be done with any tool (again CSV export/import).
Up to 3 people have been using it for one project, 12 for another (on and off..). And just myself for mine.