Which CRM to choose?
Considering market as a driving factor, CRM Systems are categorized into 4 types:
- Strategic CRM – It is mostly customer-centric, with primary focus on acquiring new and maintaining profitable customers.
- Operational CRM – It is based on customer oriented processes such as marketing, selling and customer services.
- Analytical CRM – It involves capturing, screening, interpreting, segregating, processing and analyzing customer related data. It is based on the intelligent mining of customer data.
- Collaborative CRM – It is the collaboration of different resources and domains with a view to optimize the organization and customers.
Now that we have an overview of CRM types, we get back to the main concern. Which CRM product should I go for? Before moving to decide anything, you need to ask yourself a few questions.
- What is your budget?
- What is the size of your business?
- Which department is it for?
- How much of an easy-to-use system do you need?
- What are your primary communication channels?
- What key features, processes, security policies and integrations does your business need?
- To what extent do you need the process automation?
- How much data and business analyses would you need?
- Is there an internal IT team who can implement and customize the CRM?
By now, you would have realized that there’s no one size fits all. Different CRMs come with different pros and cons with different features and pricing models. It all depends on your business needs. Below we have discussed some of the best CRMs currently in the market.
Started as an inbound marketing company and later turned into a CRM product, Hubspot is one of the leading and simplest cloud CRMs out there in the jungle of the CRM industry. It provides the easiest way to carry out different functions. More importantly, it’s absolutely free, although they do have a paid service as well which is not that expensive either. If your business is looking for a service to increase sales process productivity, then this operational CRM is the one for you.
Hubspot CRM facilitates monitoring of outbound and as well as inbound leads, sales pipeline management, email campaigning, etc. It is suitable for both B2C and B2B companies. Hubspot is mostly aimed at small and medium sized enterprises. One of the greatest strength is its single customer view and the way it integrates across the platform.
If you would like to better optimize your sales and marketing using Hubspot, contact us and we will dive into a call with you right away. Here are some of the features that Hubspot provides:
- Works in the background of the tools sales reps already use, with new features and additional access.
- Inbuilt phone system allowing for automatic call recording and logging.
- Reports and analytics.
- Company insights, prospect and deal tracking.
- Pipeline, Sales and Marketing process management.
- Outbound comms, email tracking and notifications.
- Free live chat.
- Video hosting, creation and management.
- Works seamlessly with third party tools like G-Suite and Office 365.
- Proper migration and population allows to keep track of leads and customers at different stages of the journey
Salesforce is the global leader and one of the largest and most popular Saas platforms with CRM specialization. Over the years, it has grown exponentially. Unlike other CRMs, Salesforce offers more than just a typical CRM. It offers more cloud services and integrations than any other CRM that can enhance functionality. All the team members can work together and get insights to provide exceptional services to their customers. The data organized in Salesforce helps in a better understanding of the customer. This leads to better outreach and which helps in providing more efficient customer service.
There is a separate cloud for each arm of CRM like Sales CLoud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Community Cloud Experience Cloud. This helps Salesforce cater to different needs of companies who wish to engage in different aspects of modern customer space while maintaining the ability to segregate operations between teams. Salesforce offers different services through separate pricing plans, so businesses only looking for partial CRM functionality can adjust their service level and costs to fit their needs. It is suited for enterprises of all sizes.
Here are some features of Salesforce:
- Every arm of CRM comes with different features meeting your needs.
- Cadence and API access.
- Most of the integrations that you need are possible with Salesforce.
- Task/appointment assignment.
- Database, pipeline, territory/quota, contact, contract management.
- Performance monitoring.
- Customer service automation, marketing automation tools, sales process automation.
- Enhanced communication and instant feedback.
- Follow-up tracking.
- Complete suite of data analytics.
- Full range of customizations.
- With 3 major releases a year, Salesforce never stops enhancing the existing functionalities.
- Provides a place called AppExchange where you can get apps built by others for Salesforce that could make your life easier.
With its strong emphasis on increasing leads, accelerating leads and measuring sales performance, Zoho has become one of the most widely adopted CRM systems for sales and marketing oriented companies. Zoho’s portfolio includes almost everything from accounting tools to collaborative apps. It thrives on its business management solutions. It includes features to build and automate sales processes and also lets you build distinct customer portals.
It aggregates customer data from varied sources. All the data and datasets are basically thrash without an organized data analytics process. Zoho makes great use of AI and its business intelligence features can empower to achieve more. Its bounty of features will undoubtedly improve the way you cultivate the business. Here are some:
- Support your customers across multiple channels.
- Zoho Marketplace which includes hundreds of extensions that can be added to the CRM.
- Integrates with over 70 applications and you can reap the benefits of apps like Xero, Google Analytics and DropBox.
- Zoho Projects include a whole suite of apps like Zoho Forms, Zoho Docs, Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet, Zoho Show, Zoho Reports, Zoho Chat.
- Journey orchestration with CommandCenter.
- SalesSignal feature provides real time analytics and notifications for every customer.
- Gamification i.e., encouraging teams to exceed sales quotas by awarding badges and trophies when tasks are completed.
- Predictive sales and intelligence with Zia, an AI assistant included in Zoho.
Oracle’s CRM named as Oracle CX (Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience) offers a connected suite of applications that goes beyond traditional CRM to help you build, manage and nurture customer relationships. It offers solutions to meet both B2B and B2C organizations. It also helps businesses to take action at every moment that matters – from customer acquisition to retention – and everything in between. Oracle CX Cloud is known to be one of the most complete CRMs in the market as it delivers everything from sales force automation to business intelligence. It offers a superior customer experience with its broadest portfolio of CRM solutions to address all customer touch-points.
Some of its features include:
- Sales force automation.
- Automates recording of customer interactions with click-to-dial and click-to-email.
- Consolidation of all account intelligence thereby reducing time spent on research.
- Faster onboarding and guided workflows.
- ML and AI tailored customer engagements.
- Data analytics; Reporting, dashboards and forecasting.
- Social collaboration features and mobile user support.
- Remarkable sales experience that enables sales to focus on customer success.
- Reduces campaign execution lead time.
Its portfolio includes: Marketing cloud, Service cloud, Service cloud, Engagement/Sales cloud, Commerce cloud. These in turn include a plethora of applications.
SAP CRM is part of the broad SAP ERP business suite and places itself in the market as a software designed mainly for on-premises management. It is used to implement customer business processes related to customer relationship management. Being one of the key components of SAP Business Suite, it addresses not only a company’s short term goals but also helps in reducing cost and enhancing decision making capability. Since this CRM comes within the ERP package, the software can be integrated with other SAP and non-SAP systems to handle customer management processes. SAP’s CRM is known to be one of the simplest and flexible solutions for a range of organizations.
CRM offered by SAP is one of its key on-premise platforms. It is intended to add a personal touch to every customer interaction. SAP CRM is suited for businesses of all sizes who aim to improve customer relationships. It brings in together all the tools and resources under a single hood, browser-accessible platform to ensure each customer experience is delightful and based on their necessity. The system provides a full range of solutions to increase productivity and revenue across each business component. SAP CRM includes sub-modules, with each supporting the specific functional area: SAP CRM Sales, SAP CRM Marketing, SAP CRM Service, SAP CRM Analytics, SAP CRM Web Channel.
Key features of SAP CRM include:
- Contact, Interaction and Lead management.
- CRM integration of all sources of data within the system.
- AI and ML powered automated workflows.
- Intuitive analytical arm for all the modules.
- Campaign, Order, Service and Web channel management.
- Powerful customer interaction center.
- Sales automation and augmented intelligence.
- Real-time data and multi-channel campaigns.
- Secure and mobile CRM.