What are you using for CRM?
August 18, 2023
by a searcher from York University in Toronto, ON, Canada
Hello everyone! Curious, what solutions are people using for contact management and email marketing? We are looking to make an upgrade. We presently use Airtable for tracking our contacts, deals and interactions, but it’s not a CRM. It’s a relational database solution that we have modified to meet our needs, but we are outgrowing it. Also not great for doing any sort of email campaigns.
I’ve heard good things about Zoho, Hubspot and Pipedrive. Some of the pros and cons of CRM solutions evaluated by others would also be helpful.
Thanks!
from IPADE in Mexico City, Mexico
When getting a CRM solution I highly recommend you get it based on some important points:
1. number of new leads per month to be contacted
2. Types of workflows and 3rd party integrations you will be using
3. number of seats (people) you want to use your CRM
For instance, though Hubspot is one of the best ones out there as well as Salesforce, these damn CRM solutions are costly as hell if you start using their premium plans. I'd argue that to use these CRMs to its full potential you have to consider having a good Sales Operations Manager specifically for the Sales part of the CRM. If you want to use the marketing hubs from both Salesforce and hubspot I'd recommend you consider also having a good marketing operations manager to work hand-by-hand with your sales operations and sales teams to come up with well thought workflows for the entire communications you want to send to new, potential and exiting clients.
If what you're looking for is the option to just send email sequences I'd recommend you try solo tools like MailChimp or Saleshandy (the last for prospecting using Cold Calling 2.0 frameworks, for example).
If you do feel like you need to jump to a CRM, Pipedrive is a great tool for smaller companies who want to just use the CRM as it is. The next step would be to use Hubspot although Zoho could also be an option due to its "ERP" capabilities (tho for this reason it could stay short vs hubspot in terms of CRM exclusively). Salesforce would be a no-go in my opinion just because it's so unfriendly and mostly used by much much larger companies with many different revenue streams and so much customization per communication they need that yeah... don't go through that route (yet)
from Southwestern University in Houston, TX, USA
Odoo has a worse user interface, but is entirely free as long as it's the only Odoo (which is really an ERP platform) product that you're using. But even if you add their (less intuitive, less powerful) emailing solutions, it's still only $25/mo and now you get *all* Odoo functionality.
There are a *ton* of solutions out there (I see a new CRM pop up daily) and most of them can do whatever you'll need if you're just graduating from Airtable - the key is that you've got to spend time learning the platform no matter which you pick.