The Startup and Small
Business CRM Buyer’s Guide
Choose the right CRM system for your company
Authors:
Adrian Mott
Ben Smith
Bedrock Data, Inc.
Adrian Mott is a co-founder of
Bedrock Data, and has been a
consultant and developer in the
business automation space for 10+
years. Adrian has implemented
CRM, marketing and integration
applications at companies of all
sizes.
Twitter: @adrianmott
Ben Smith is a co-founder of Bedrock
Data, and is former director of
operations at HubSpot, Inc. where he
oversaw a huge deployment of
Salesforce.com. Ben has worked with
many CRMs and brings unique
perspective to the industry.
Twitter: @therealbensmith
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Highrise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Capsule CRM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9
Batchbook. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Pipedrive. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .15
Close.io . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Zoho . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .21
“
The only source of competitive advantage is the one
that can survive technology-fueled digital disruption —
an obsession with understanding, delighting,
connecting with, and serving customers. This means
effectively managing the four key areas of customer
relationship management (CRM).
- William Band, Forrester Research
How We Rate These CRMs
There are 8 specific metrics that we’re going to use to rate the different
CRM’s in this e-book, defined below:
1. Customization: Does the system let you create custom fields and
objects? If so, are all the field types that you may need supported?
Everyone needs the almighty lead object, but after you’ve
successfully implemented the standard system objects, what else
can you create to represent your business?
2. Automation: Automation refers specifically to lead assignment and
workflow rules. We’ll review these capabilities in each system and
give you
3. Bonus Customizations: Other customizations that may be
available to you in the system’s core functionality, including custom
coding, to-do lists, email dropboxes, etc…
4. Mobile: Short review of available mobile applications that exist for
the system, developed by the company themselves or by a third
party. Focused on iOS and Android apps only.
5. Marketplace and Add-ons: Integrations can often be the make or
break factor for choosing a system to roll out – automated data
transfer is key to saving time and money. We’ll look at how well
each system has done to find integration partners to date.
6. Pricing, Editions and Scalability: We’ll review the pricing and
editions that the system offers, including the flexibility you get and
the pros and cons of certain editions the system offers.
7. Best Features: What are the best features of this system, how do
they work and what can they do for your team?
8. Overall: Bottom line: how good of a system is this for your business
and should you go through with the purchase of this CRM system?
Highrise CRM
37 Signals, LLC
Highrise is a CRM offering geared for small teams, due to it’s simple
functionality and design. If you’re aren’t familiar with the company who
makes Highrise: 37 Signals, they’re the same folks who wrote the popular
project management software Basecamp and also the popular web
programming framework Ruby on Rails. It’s simple design and limited
functionality make it great for the right team, but not great for larger sales
organizations who need room to grow.
Customization:
Fields: Highrise does give you the capability to create custom fields in the
system, though the fields that can create can only be of one type: text.
There is no way to create fields with other types like dropdowns, picklists or
checkboxes.
Objects: Highrise’s standard data objects: Contacts, Deals, Tasks and Cases
accentuate the simplicity of the system. There isn’t a way to create custom
objects, and that’s exactly the way things were meant to be designed. The
spirit of Highrise is simplicity, and thus should probably be considered more
of a contact management application with sales tools than a fully featured
CRM.
CRM Buyer’s Guide 2013
Automation:
Workflows: No workflow automation functionality exists.
Lead Assignment: Highrise doesn’t have any automated lead assignment
rules, but does allow you to “tag” contacts and then search and view
contacts with these tags. Other than that, there is no concept of a lead
owner in the system, so therefore lead assignment rules are a moot point.
Bonus Features and Customizations:
Email Dropbox: Highrise has a “dropbox” feature that enables email
integration from your email client (no relationship to the Dropbox backup
product). This feature enables you to send emails to a dedicated email
address linked to your Highrise account. Any contact included on an email
will automatically get that message appended to their profile in Highrise, or
a new contact will get created if that contact’s email address doesn’t exist.
There is also dedicated email addresses to create tasks in Highrise by
sending an email – the task will be named by the subject line in your email.
Mobile:
iOS: Highrise has a native iPhone app in the app store. At the time of this
writing, the app had a 3/5 star rating and many bad reviews complaining
about limited functionality in the app. The biggest insult about the iOS app
is that you can’t interact fully with all of your data that you have in Highrise.
You can only access Contacts and Tasks in the app, there is no way to
access Deals at all, which is frustrating.
Android: N/A -- No Android app exists.
Marketplace Add-Ons:
Something that Highrise has a nice collection of is 3rd party integrations and
connectors to different systems out there. We haven’t vetted many of these
add-ons, but Highrise appears to link to a lot of other application home
pages form their add-on links page. These applications do integrate with
Highrise, but it’s not entirely apparent how at first glance. Nice set of
applications list here in any case.
CRM Buyer’s Guide 2013
Pricing, Editions and Scalability:
The theme of Highrise is in its simplicity and usefulness for small teams.
Thus, the notion of scaling Highrise with a growing team isn’t
recommended. A breakdown of the Highrise pricing reveals some interesting
tidbits (https://highrisehq.com/signup):
•
Free Plan (2 users, 250 max contacts): Free
•
Basic Plan (6 users, 5,000 max contacts, 10 max deals): $24/month
•
Solo Plan (1 user, 20,000 max contacts, unlimited deals): $29/month
•
Plus Plan (15 users, 20,000 max contacts, unlimited deals): $49/month
•
Premium Plan (40 users, 30,000 max contacts, unlimited deals):
$99/month
As you can see, even the highest, most expensive plan only gives you the
ability to have 30,000 contacts in the system, making Highrise a systems for
small companies and sales groups only.
Best Features:
The best feature of Highrise is its simple design and usability. The simple
design goes beyond aesthetics also, the data objects that you get with
Highrise: Contacts, Deals and Tasks represent the records that they actually
are in real life, and that simplicity shouldn’t be overlooked. You don’t need a
CRM admin to implement or use Highrise, and that alone is valuable.
Overall:
Highrise is a system meant for small teams and it’s a generally nice product
for teams of 5 users and under. It’s easy to use and almost easier to
administer. It’s also easy to import/export your data from Highrise, making
moving on and off the system a breeze.
We recommend using Highrise if you’re an independent consultant or have a
team of 3-5 sales reps.
Capsule
Zestia, Ltd.
Capsule is a lean CRM system that is limited in functionality but allows for
basic but essential contact management, along with opportunities and also
cases for basic customer support. The system is very similar to Highrise and
Pipedrive, with some added functionality built in such as the calendar
application and the before mentioned case management. There are also some
built-in integrations that you can get with Capsule, which are handy – these
include Zendesk, Wufoo and Freshbooks.
Customization:
Fields: You can create custom fields of various types in Capsule and also
create separate fields on each object (people and organizations, cases and
opportunities). Field types are basic: text, date, list, checkbox (multi-select)
and link.
Objects: While you can’t create custom objects in Capsule, the standard
objects that you really need are there: people, organizations, opportunities
and cases.
Opportunity Stages: Capsule let’s you customize your opportunity stages in
the system to define your own pipeline to track deals over time.
CRM Buyer’s Guide 2013
Automation:
Workflows: No workflow automation functionality exists.
Lead Assignment: Capsule doesn’t let you assign records to user in the
system, but you can tag people records and then view people by these tags.
You can assign opportunities to users however, but none of this is automated,
which is sort of frustrating.
Bonus Features and Customizations:
Lists: Perhaps the best part of the product – Capsule lets you create lists of
your contacts and opportunities, and then download them to Excel, bulk add
tags or notes to each contact in that list or export them to MailChimp as a
part of that integration.
Sales Pipeline Customization and UI: Perhaps the biggest differentiator
with Capsule is the nice Sales pipeline user interface that they provide to their
users. It comes with an out of the box dashboard with a forecast report and a
report based on opportunity stage.
Email Dropbox: Essentially an identical feature to Highrise and Pipedrive
here, this let’s you CC a dedicated Capsule email address from your email
client and that message will be automatically appended to that contact in
Capsule. This makes it possible to get email message data onto a person
record in Capsule, but you have to remember to do this each time, which can
be a pain with a team of sales reps.
Mobile:
iOS: Capsule makes an iOS app that is pretty functional, and essentially
mimics the functionality of the web application.
Android: Capsule also offers an Android app, who’s functionality is
essentially the same as the iOS app and is a nice perk.
Marketplace Add-Ons:
One place where Capsule succeeds against its competition is in it’s native
integrations with some other popular web applications:
Freshbooks Integration: Let’s you sync contacts to/from Freshbooks. Also
lets you view invoice and payment information from Freshbooks in Capsule.
MailChimp Integration: Works in conjunction with the lists app in Capsule.
Create a list and sync it to MailChimp as a mailing list in that system.
CRM Buyer’s Guide 2013
Pricing, Editions and Scalability:
The pricing and editions for Capsule are minimal and easy to understand:
•
Free Plan (2 users, 250 contacts, unlimited opportunities, no
integrations): Free
•
Professional Plan (50,000 contacts, unlimited opportunities, integrations
included): $12/user/month
It’s that simple, no joke and no nonsense with Capsule’s pricing. It also
makes that edition decision easy for you in terms of which edition to go
with.
Best Features:
Integrations: The best features of Capsule is the ability to create lists of
contacts and sync them to MailChimp, as a part of the Professional edition
of the CRM.
Sales Pipeline Reporting: Another nice feature is the out of the box sales
pipeline reports that you get out of the Capsule system. While the reporting
functionality is somewhat limited, this report is at least something for sales
to report on. There are some other nice “bonus” features of the system like
case management, but these are limited and more geared for basic support
queues and don’t match up well to Zendesk feature wise, which at their
lowest pricing level is very affordable.
Overall:
Capsule is a lean system, and that’s consistent through out the model of
their business, including their pricing. It’s a good system for small groups,
but lacks some of the functionality and usability that make systems like
Pipedrive and Close.io awesome to use. It’s for this reason that we’d
recommend you take a hard look at some of the other system on our list
here before making your final decision.
Bottom line: If you’re looking to grow your business and sales team over
time, you’re probably going to have to move off of Capsule at some point to
accommodate the needs of your team and your reps.
Batchbook
Batchbook is a CRM that is geared for small businesses that focuses their user
experience on delivering excellent contact and company profiles for sales reps.
Batchbook is an easy tool to use – learning it takes just a few minutes. There
aren’t a lot of bells and whistles, but the app includes most all CRM capabilities
that you’d come to expect in a small business CRM. One way Batchbook
enhances the user profile is by letting users view their contact’s social media
profiles, including recent social posts, right in their Batchbook profile. This is a
nice feature, especially because it saves your sales reps and extra jump to see
a prospects social posts and interests – very useful!
Customization:
Fields: Batchbook enables you to create custom fields and add values to
them. A nice aspect of these custom fields in Batchbook is that you have the
ability to organize your custom fields into sets that keep these fields organized
(organization is a common theme here).
Objects: Being a lead CRM tool, you can’t create any custom objects, and the
standard objects that come out of the box are people, deals and companies.
CRM Buyer’s Guide 2013
Automation:
Workflows: No workflow automation functionality exists.
Lead Assignment: There is no concept of a “lead owner” in Batchbook, but
you can assign to-do list items to users in the system. No automation around
this though.
Bonus Features and Customizations:
People/Company Lists: Batchbook lets you create lists in the system that
encapsulate both people and companies. Lists have come a long way in
recent years, and let you export people and company in lists to MailChimp,
CSV or HTML.
To-Do Lists: This useful feature allows you to create to-do items, tag them,
assign them to other users and attach them to contact records. Nice-to-have
feature that aligns more with project management than CRM.
Email Dropbox: Essentially an identical feature to Highrise and Pipedrive
here, this let’s you CC a dedicated Batchbook email address from your email
client and that message will be automatically appended to that contact in
Batchbook.
Marketplace Add-Ons:
Batchbook has a collection of integrations that they list on their website,
many of which are email marketing and financial applications that allow you
to sync people and lists to and from applications like MailChimp, Freshbooks,
Xero and Quickbooks online. There are also a number of third party
integration offerings like Bedrock Data.
Let’s face it: the ideal scenario is to configure an automated integration that
will continuously pipe contacts into and out of Batchbook and update leads,
contacts and opportunities as they change in your other systems. Don’t
believe us? Try it yourself for free.
CRM Buyer’s Guide 2013
Pricing, Editions and Scalability:
The pricing and editions for Batchbook are extremely simple and
reasonable. What’s nice also is that their pricing doesn’t include a “per
user” model, like other CRMs. Here’s a rundown of popular pricing plans:
•
$46/month (annual payment): 10,000 contacts
•
$80/month (annual payment): 20,000 contacts
•
$113/month (annual payment): 30,000 contacts
With all of these plans, you get unlimited users, contacts, deals and
everything else. Contact and relationship management for small groups, it’s
really geared around solo entrepreneurs, creative folks and small stage
startups, as 30K contacts is the max you can have on any plan.
Best Features:
Social Media Lookups and Aggregation: Unique to Batchbook is the
ability to pull social interactions into a contact or company profile. You can
automatically look up a person or company Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn
profile and have their activity streaming right on the profile page in
Batchbook. It’s a big differentiator and an excellent feature for sales reps
looking to engage in social media as a part of their sales process.
Integrations: Batchbook, like Capsule has done a pretty good job with
internal integrations, including some popular systems that small business
certainly make the most of. Along with some other 3rd party integrations
that they list this is a strong point.
Overall:
Contact and relationship management for small groups: this is Batchbook in
a nutshell, and it does a pretty good job with that. It’s not a CRM in the
same sense that some other systems are – Batchbook is not geared for
sales management and reporting, it’s a contact management system with
some nice features. We’d definitely recommend Batchbook for any small
business who want to share contacts. But if you’re working deals in a sales
process as a part of your day-to-day, then Batchbook is not for you.
Pipedrive
Pipedrive, Inc.
Pipedrive is a sales management tool that is built with the sales rep mentality
in mind. It’s built with modern technology, is fast and responsive and
extremely useful for a sales organization who may be diversified or who has
sales reps who can benefit from a visual representation of their funnel. Many
modern CRM offerings that have hit the market in the last few years have had
similar user experiences, gearing their UX around the sales pipeline, or
lead/deal statuses, rather than the more traditional systems that aren’t as
UI/UX driven.
Customization:
Fields: With Pipedrive, you can create custom fields of various types,
including text, multi-select, single option, dates, etc… Fields are shared
globally throughout the account; there is no way to prevent a user from seeing
certain fields in the system currently. Pipedrive also give you the ability to
create separate fields on each data object.
Objects: Pipedrive has standard objects that represent the entities that they
encapsulate very well: Contacts (People), Deals, Organizations and Activities.
Everything is geared around the deals that you’re working on, and Pipedrive’s
analytics module works around that data as well. There is no way to create
custom objects within Pipedrive, but you can have multiple pipelines.
CRM Buyer’s Guide 2013
Automation:
Workflows: No workflow automation functionality exists.
Lead Assignment: Pipedrive does have the idea of leads assignment, but
there doesn’t appear to be automation around this at all. If you’re
integrated with a product or are using the Pipedrive API at all, then you
would be able to do automated assignment through that, but not through
the product today.
Bonus Features and Customizations:
Pipeline UI and Customization: Really the best feature about the
platform is the ability to simply organize your potential deals in an intuitive
way. This UI alone makes me want to use the product for our sales team.
Google Integration: Pipedrive provides native integration with Google
apps like Google Drive for backing up your Pipedrive files, Google Contacts
for importing contacts and Google Calendar integration for syncing activities
that you create in Pipedrive to your Google Calendar (extremely useful!).
Email Dropbox: Essentially an identical feature to Highrise, this let’s you
CC a dedicated Pipedrive email address from your email client and that
message will be automatically appended to that contact in Pipedrive.
Mobile:
iOS: Great iOS app in the app store, no ranking or rating to date however,
which means not much engaged usage. Nice app though, essentially get all
of the functionality of the web application and access to seemingly all
objects.
Android: Vizir Software (third party) has created a Pipedrive Android app in
the Google Play store that is free and has essentially all of the features of
the iOS app.
Marketplace Add-Ons:
No dedicated add-ons or integrations besides the Google integration
mentioned above or from third parties. Perhaps it’s something that Pipedrive
will expand on in the future, but it’s lacking now. The Pipedrive API is easily
accessible however and very easy to code against.
CRM Buyer’s Guide 2013
Pricing, Editions and Scalability:
There are a few pricing plans, which accentuate Pipedrive’s target market:
SMB’s and smaller sales organizations. All editions are paid and break down
as follows:
•
Solo Plan (1 user, unlimited deals): $14/month
•
Lite Plan (5 users, unlimited deals): $29/month
•
Business Plan (12 users, unlimited deals): $59/month
•
Business XL Plan (30 users, unlimited deals): $129/month
•
“Larger” Plans (Call them…): $???/month
As you can see, even the highest, most expensive plan they advertise only
gives you the ability to have 30 users in the system, making Pipedrive a
system for small companies and sales groups only. If your sales team is
greater that 30 employees, then you want to consider another CRM.
Best Features:
The best feature if Pipedrive is its user interface, which is sleek, easy to use
and learn and also incredibly useful. The deals pipeline in their system,
which is simply a way to look at a list of your deals, categorized by stage
and laid out side-by-side, seems simple but is incredibly helpful and
intuitive. You can also drag and drop deals from one stage to the next,
another plus.
Overall:
There is no doubt that Pipedrive, like Highrise, is a CRM for small groups
and start-ups. It’s inexpensive, fairly feature rich for a small company, and
nicely designed. There’s no doubt in my mind that Pipedrive is a nice system
and we do recommend it for small teams that don’t yet have a need for
more automation in their systems. It’s also great for teams that may work
apart from each other, as it really caters to the independent sales
professional who keeps track of their own sales funnel.
We recommend using Pipedrive if you’re building a team or have a team of
under 15 sales reps.
Close.io
Elastic, Inc.
Close.io is a new CRM application that incorporates calls and call tracking
along with more traditional CRM sales tools. This calling stuff I was skeptical
about at first, but it’s actually a really nice feature of the product and a huge
differentiator for Close.io and the team at Elastic. The product also includes
native Mac and Windows desktop apps, is nicely designed and the team
provides fanatical support that is truly inspiring.
Customization:
Fields: Custom fields in Close.io are interesting in that you can create custom
fields, but they are administered from the lead detail pages themselves, rather
then from an admin area. Custom fields appear to be custom to their leads
that you create them on also, meaning that if I create a custom field on one
lead, it isn’t accessible on any others. Also, custom fields are text only, but the
fields remember their past values, creating a sort of dropdown field type.
Objects: Close.io doesn’t have the ability to create custom objects. The
standard objects are basic but efficient: Lead (which is really a company),
Contact (associated with leads), Opportunities (deals) and Tasks round out the
platform.
CRM Buyer’s Guide 2013
Automation:
Workflows: No workflow automation functionality exists.
Lead Assignment: There isn’t currently any lead owner functionality in
Close.io, thus automated lead assignment isn’t feasible at this time.
Bonus Features and Customizations:
Voice Integration (calling): This is the feature that makes Close.io.
Through a native integration with call platform Plivo, Close.io’s bonus
feature is also it’s best feature and biggest differentiator. It works by
assigning you a dedicated number that you can then pop onto your website
or in your email signature. Close.io will then route any calls to your personal
number right to the app on your desktop where you can chat with a lead
from your laptop (oh, did we mention that there are native OSX and
windows desktop apps?). You can also make calls out from the app to any
lead, and the price of the voice integration is rolled into the cost of the
system, which isn’t cheap.
Mobile:
No mobile apps exist at this time.
Marketplace Add-Ons:
No dedicated add-ons or integrations besides the Plivo phone integration
mentioned above or from third parties. Perhaps it’s something that Close.io
will expand on in the future, but it’s lacking now. It should be mentioned
that the Close.io API is easily accessible, and very easy to code against with
it’s RESTful layout and JSON data formatting.
// Page 5
CRM Buyer’s Guide 2013
Pricing, Editions and Scalability:
Close.io’s pricing had us scratching our heads from a consumer perspective.
At $59/month you don’t get any calling stuff, so the product becomes very
expensive for what it is. At $99 and $149, you get the calling functionality,
but it also becomes very expensive very quickly. At these prices, I can put a
new iPhone in each of my sales reps hands and have them use Zoho and I’ll
still save money:
•
Basic Plan (No phone features): $59/user/month
•
Professional Plan (No int’l calling, no call recording): $99/user/month
•
Business Plan (Everything included): $149/user/month
Because of the seat pricing and lack of resource limits in the product,
Close.io is certainly scalable to a large sales team, but because of some
lacking automation features, this isn’t very practical for a team of more than
5-10 sales reps.
Best Features:
Hands down, the best feature of Close.io is the calling functionality and their
native apps. The lead/contact/opportunity breakdown in Close.io is also
interesting and rather unique, but there isn’t a ton of value added here, and
we found it actually less intuitive than more traditional CRM apps where
leads are converted into contacts.
Overall:
Close.io is a young product, we get it. The product exudes the innovative,
smart thinking that it’s creators certainly can bring to the table, and
launching with a native app for both Mac and Windows, as well as the web
is an impressive move on their end. This certainly is a system to keep an
eye on as they build out more reporting functionality (currently basically
non-existent) and look to create mobile apps (which could be
groundbreaking if executed well).
We certainly recommend Close.io as a CRM and call tracking application, if
you can afford it.
Zoho CRM
Zoho, Inc.
Zoho CRM is one of the many product offerings that Zoho has. The company
has focused on building out a suite of software that includes office
applications, reporting application and a fully baked CRM that rivals some of
the top systems on the market today. It’s been said that Zoho CRM is a decent
alternative to Salesforce.com and from what we’ve seen that statement is
accurate.
Customization:
Fields: Zoho gives full ability to create any custom field, but does set limits to
the amount of custom fields that you can create on certain levels of the
product. In our instance, we’re limited to 130 custom fields, which is probably
more than enough, but should be noted anyhow.
Objects: Zoho CRM includes the full set of “standard” CRM objects: leads,
contacts, accounts and potentials (opportunities), as well as tasks, emails and
notes. There is no custom object creation in Zoho at this time.
Layouts and Tabs: Love this feature about Zoho because it really sets it
apart form some of the smaller CRMs and makes it feel like a more legit CRM
system. Zoho lets you edit field layouts and create tabs for viewing your data.
CRM Buyer’s Guide 2013
Automation:
Workflows: Zoho’s Standard, Professional and Enterprise editions enable
you to create workflows in the system for as little as $12/user/month. These
are fairly standard workflow rules that you’ll find in other systems like Sugar
and Salesforce.com with triggers, alerts and actions. Certain advanced
functionality like webhooks and field updates (as an action) are reserved for
the Professional and Enterprise editions only.
Lead Assignment: Automated lead assignment is a nice feature in Zoho,
allowing you to create automated lead assignment rules based on specific
criteria. This is a key part of sales automation: letting sales organizations
organize their team members by territory, industry, buyer persona, company
size, etc… This is key feature for any CRM system to have to scale to a
growing sales organization.
Bonus Features and Customizations:
Zoho Creator and Deluge Script: Zoho’s answer to Salesforce.com’s
APEX scripting language and the ultimate customization feature for any
CRM: the ability to write code (and in Zoho’s case, drag and drop code
blocks) directly against the object data within the system itself, letting you
really create your own rules and automation for any Zoho data in the CRM.
There are some prerequisites to using deluge script though: you have to
have access to CRM Enterprise edition, plus another subscription to Zoho
creator, but these run fairly cheap (minimum $25/month).
Mobile:
Zoho has an iOS and Android app that are both useful, but not awesome.
Like many CRM mobile applications, you really lose a lot of the functionality
that comes with screen real estate when going from a web app to a mobile
app. You can obviously make instant calls to your leads through the mobile
app, which is nice, but there isn’t a whole lot of usefulness with Zoho’s
iPhone app at this point.
Marketplace Add-Ons:
One of the only features that holds Zoho CRM back is their notoriously low
API limits, which can get in the way of automation and integration for any
add-ons. There are add-ons in the CRM, but they focus on other Zoho apps,
which is sort of a cop out.
CRM Buyer’s Guide 2013
Pricing, Editions and Scalability:
Zoho’s pricing is affordable for the type of system that you get, which can
go a long way for a moderately sized sales team:
•
Free Plan (3 users, 5,000 record limit, 250 API calls/day): Free
•
Standard Plan (100K record limit, 250 API calls/user/day):
$12/user/month
•
Professional Plan (Unlimited records, Automation, 250 API
calls/user/day): $20/user/month
•
Enterprise Plan (Unlimited records, Full Automation Suite, 500 API
calls/user/day)
Zoho is cheap enough that for many sales organizations considering it, the
Enterprise package is probably the correct one for many sales teams. The
pricing will also allow you to scale with the product, as will many of the
features that you’ll find in the Enterprise product.
Best Features:
The best features of Zoho are the amount of features themselves. It’s fine
to talk about software simplicity for many web and mobile applications
today, but if you’re a sales/marketing/IT professional responsible for rolling
out a CRM system that can increase sales efficiency and scale with your
growing company, then there are certain automation features that you must
have, and Zoho (thankfully) has them.
Reporting is also a strength of Zoho’s, giving you the ability to create nice
customized reports that you can export, save and share with your team.
Their reporting application is much like some other CRM’s, letting your
create and organize reports on the data within any object in the system.
Overall:
Zoho is hands down a great CRM (full disclosure: we’re customers and we
love it), that we’d highly recommend. It’s a fantastic alternative to
Salesforce.com, especially around the customization and automation
functionality. Save for not being able to create custom objects in Zoho, there
isn’t a lot that this CRM can’t do.
Need to Integrate?
Check out Bedrock’s
Integrations, Backup and
Data Management Apps:
http://www.bedrockdata.com