Important CRM Software

24/09/2022 1 By indiafreenotes

HubSpot CRM

HubSpot’s free CRM is a top-notch system for startups or anyone looking to get acquainted with CRM tools.

HubSpot CRM helps you manage your sales pipeline, create automated email sequences for your leads, communicate with your prospects via live chat or emails, and track customer interactions across email, social media, or calls.

HubSpot CRM is free for contacts up to 1,000,000. As your company grows, you can upgrade to other marketing, sales, and customer service packages, or you can integrate other third-party products with the tool.

Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM is one of the products from Zoho’s exhaustive business suite. Zoho CRM offers features that are suitable for both SMBs and large-scale organizations. The CRM application comes with sales automation, pipeline management, marketing automation, and process management features. You can connect with your leads across different platforms through a single interface.

Zia – Zoho’s AI bot helps businesses with identifying trends, predicting sales, and data enrichment activities.

Companies can get started with Zoho CRM for as low as $18/month and upgrade as they move along.

Freshsales

Freshsales is a sales CRM by Freshdesk. Features such as event tracking, phone, emails, workflows, etc. enable you to track your leads and deals across their purchase journey.

Like HubSpot and Zoho CRM, Freshsales offers mobile CRM and a range of products for business, making it easy to build a comprehensive MarTech stack.

Freshsales is perfect for SMBs and mid-market enterprises, and you can get started with the tool for $18/month.

Salesforce Sales Cloud

Salesforce Sales Cloud is a CRM tool offered by Salesforce. The CRM tool covers the entire purchase journey and includes features such as account and contact management, opportunity management, lead management, intuitive workflows, file sharing, and sales forecasting.

Business owners and salespeople can manage their sales activities on the go through mobile CRM.

Beginners can opt for the Salesforce Essential plan at $25/user/month (paid annually). Users can avail add-ons such as Sales Cloud Einstein (Salesforce’s AI tool) and Pardot (Salesforce’s marketing automation platform) at an additional subscription fee.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is primarily a MAP that also offers specific CRM capabilities. Mailchimp is perfect for freelancers, startups, and SMBs as it provides the ideal blend of features that are useful for both sales and marketing departments.

Mailchimp has a free plan for a list size up to 2000 contacts with bare essential CRM features and paid plans starting $9.99/month.

Mailchimp is widely used among startups and SMBs because of its capability to integrate with other enterprise CRMs such as Salesforce.

Important:

Customization

No two businesses are the same, so the best CRM software can cater to your business’s unique needs. Some CRM solutions let you choose which features to include in your package, and some also allow you to customize basic areas, such as with the abilities to add contact fields, choose which data to show on your dashboard and create custom reports. You can also customize with extensions, plugins and other add-ons to expand your software’s capabilities.

Workflow automation

CRM software can make your life easier by automating your workflow. Look for software that lets you set up custom rules and comes with sales force automation to help you and your team be more productive.

By using rules, you can set your CRM software to automatically perform a specific action based on triggers or events, such as these:

  • When a potential customer fills out a contact form on your website, the CRM software automatically directs the message to the right sales representative or department.
  • When a sales representative receives a message, the CRM software automatically sends a preset response to acknowledge the message.

Third-party integration

Connecting your CRM software to other solutions you already use can save you tons of time and money. Most CRM programs offer third-party software integrations; the key is choosing one that’s compatible with the software you use and easy to implement. For instance, popular CRM software Salesforce has its own marketplace called AppExchange, where users can easily connect Salesforce to solutions such as QuickBooks accounting software, Mailchimp email marketing software and DocuSign electronic signatures.

Here are a few things you can do with the right third-party integrations to make your life easier:

  • Run CRM software straight from Outlook, Gmail or other email clients so you don’t have to keep switching between apps.
  • Automatically sync sales and order information with your POS system and accounting software to eliminate manual data entry.
  • Automatically build email lists and launch email marketing campaigns from either your email marketing software or CRM software so you don’t have to open both.
  • Back up and sync data with Dropbox, Box.com and other popular cloud backup storage services.

Employee tracking

CRM software is a great way to track employee activity and performance. Choose software that gives employees their own accounts where they can individually track their hours, tasks, meetings, sales numbers, goals and other items. The software should also give supervisors and upper management access to dashboards that let them view individual employee goals, completed tasks and other metrics of productivity. This can help managers write employee performance reviews, create incentives, reward strong employees, and identify those who are struggling and address areas of improvement.          

Social media

A CRM with built-in social media monitoring features can save your marketing team time, because they won’t have to switch platforms to perform the essential task of monitoring your company’s social media.

Salesforce, for example, has tools for you to perform these social media tasks:

  • Get in tune with what people are saying about your brand through social listening.
  • Gain insight into the numbers of social media actions your brand gets, such as comments, shares and mentions.
  • Check every social media channel (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) to customize your social media strategy accordingly.
  • Get insight into who your customers are.
  • Identify and leverage your brand.
  • Manage the day-to-day tasks of posting to your social media accounts.

Customer service

CRM software can help you acquire and retain customers by providing excellent customer service. Look for the following capabilities that will allow your sales reps and customer support team to perform their best:

  • Gives you a 360-degree comprehensive view of customers that shows everything there is to know about a customer from the first point of contact
  • Automatically tracks all points of communications, from lead acquisition to closed sales and sales histories
  • Logs all incidents, website visits, purchase histories, and other activities for future reference and to keep all reps on the same page
  • Uses customers’ first names to personalize all correspondence
  • Has unique reference numbers for each account, customer and help issue
  • Automatically sends customers acknowledgments of their inquiries and messages so they don’t feel ignored
  • Supports premade email templates and call scripts that answer the most common questions