Industry Insights

A Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) is a tool used to manage a company’s relationships with their customers and suppliers. It can come in the form of a mobile app, web-based app, or software that you install on a computer.

The main benefits of having a powerful CRM in place are:

• Contact organization: A supercharged Rolodex that your entire sales and customer service staff can access. It also gives you the ability to segment contacts in many different ways (handy when planning marketing campaigns!).
• Sales tracking: Track sales efforts like emails, calls, meetings, and deals closed to understand what your team is doing well and what to improve.
• Sales reporting: Ditch the Excel spreadsheet. CRMs are much more powerful, reliable and easier to use.

You may have heard of Salesforce, Oracle or Dynamics. Those are the top three most powerful CRMs used by today’s largest corporations. While they’re top notch, one-stop marketing tools, they are no longer the only players in town.

Small or medium-sized companies can now implement robust, automated campaigns using much cheaper, easier to use tools.

This helpful post will list a few of our favourites.

HubSpot

HubSpot offers four main platforms that interconnect. The first one is its free CRM. The HubSpot Free CRM gives you everything you need to organize your contacts, track and nurture leads and existing customers. As the name suggests, it’s free!

HubSpot CRM is one of the most powerful CRMs out there. Despite its vast amount of features, it’s straightforward to use.

Features

• Gather leads from your website
• View your entire pipeline in real time
• Manage your sales pipeline
• Forecast future sales
• Mobile app access
• Online chat tool integration

Email marketing integrations

HubSpot offers email marketing tools through HubSpot Marketing Hub, but as your list grows, things can get pricey. Thankfully, HubSpot connects to MailChimp and Campaign Monitor through Zapier for $20 a month.

Pricing

• Free: Free basic CRM, Marketing Hub and Sales Hub.
• Marketing or Sales Hub Starter: Both start at $50 a month.

Zoho

Zoho is one of the most straightforward CRMs. It’s powerful, easy to use, and it can connect to your website, email marketing tools, Google’s G Suite, Microsoft’s Outlook and even social media apps!

Features

• Gather leads from your website
• Customize your workflow and lead info for your team
• Forecast future sales
• Review detailed reports
• Integrate seamlessly with other Zoho apps
• Mobile app access

Email marketing integrations

Zoho easily integrates with Campaign Monitor using a simple connector tool from Kloud Connectors. The cost to connect the two platforms starts at $14 a month.

Pricing

• Free: Free for teams of up to three people. Includes basic features.
• Standard: $18 a month. Includes sales forecasting, custom fields, and more.
• Professional: $30 a month. Standard and email (ditch the Gmail or Outlook apps!), social media CRM, inventory management, and more.
• Enterprise: $45/month. Professional and voice conversational AI, multi-user ports, conditional fields, subforms, encryption at rest, and more.
• Annual pricing: $144, $240, $420 per person for Standard, Professional, and Enterprise accounts, respectively. Accurate as of July 2018.

Insightly

Insightly is a CRM and sales project management tool. While it can perform the same basic tasks that other CRMs can, the user interface is not as nice. Insightly makes the list because of its built-in integrations with MailChimp, Google’s G Suite and Microsoft’s Outlook.

Features

• Gather leads from your website
• Manage customer relationships, leads, projects, and tasks
• Schedule and track emails to customers
• View custom reports and dashboards
• Easily integrates with MailChimp, Google, Microsoft and other email apps

Email Marketing Integrations

Seamless integration with MailChimp, Google and Outlook. Campaign Monitor integration can be achieved using Zapier (free version would work, depending on how many contacts you have) or using a simple connector tool from Kloud Connectors. The cost to connect the two platforms using Kloud starts at $14 a month.

Pricing

• Free: Free basic CRM, Marketing Hub and Sales Hub.
• Marketing or Sales Hub Starter: Both start at $50 a month.

We understand that the language surrounding CRMs can be a bit jargony and hard to understand at times. If you still have questions, or you’d like find out more about CRMs and how to get them working for you, you can always send us an email. We’d be happy to chat with you about it!