Every big brand uses a CRM system today to build and maintain long-lasting relationships with clients. Let me show you the value of a CRM service.
Mr. Smith often makes business trips to New York. He stays in his favorite 5-star hotel in the city center which is not surprising. The hotel provides free transfer services for its loyal clients. Mr. Smith always stays in the deluxe courtyard room which is a great place for quiet rest. The hotel staff knows about his health issues, so Mr. Smith has hypoallergenic cosmetics in his room and he is served dietary foods.
Such a caring service seems almost unreal, right?
But it’s possible with the help of a powerful CRM system. Choosing one for your business will let you collect and record all the data about your customers in one place. You can access it anytime you need to monitor your previous interactions with a client, contact them, or create personalized and unique offers. This is just the tip of the iceberg of features provided by a CRM system.
To choose the right service for your business, let’s consider the 5 most popular and well-established CRM systems on the market. You’ll get to know their basic functionality, benefits, and pricing options.
SendPulse
SendPulse is an all-in-one marketing platform that provides a CRM system and other landing page, and chatbot builder; email, SMS, and web push notification service. This is a suite of the essential marketing tools that help small and medium-sized businesses move leads down the sales funnel, automate communication and sales. You don’t need to be a tech-savvy marketer to make the most out of SendPulse. The platform is the best choice for beginners due to its intuitive interface.
SendPulse CRM allows users to collect information about leads and customers, access and review it anytime, accept orders and payments, manage deals with a kanban board, assign customers to sales reps, send marketing campaigns via different channels.
Take a look at the essential SendPulse CRM features:
- permissions management;
- both manual and automatic deal creating;
- 4 sources of automatic deal creation: landing page, chatbots (Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram), payments, Automation 360 (after a user performs a certain action);
- contact filtering;
- contact attributes management for personalized communication;
- reaching clients via email or chatbot;
- alerts notifying of a new deal.
You can view all your SendPulse deals either as a list or as a Kanban board which allows you to track the progress of your team. Each client has its own card, so you can open it to access their personal information and the history of interactions with your brand.
Look at the dashboard of deals below.
How much does SendPulse CRM cost?
SendPulse CRM is absolutely free. You can make the most out of it totally for free, so it’s a great platform to test the opportunities of a CRM system since you don’t have to invest anything.
If you want to use other SendPulse products like email, chatbot builder, or SMS campaigns along with the CRM, you can do it for free or evaluate advanced features the pricing for which starts at $6,40/month. For this price, you can invite 3 users to your account, send unlimited emails, create 3 landing pages, and much more.
Zoho CRM
Zoho CRM is the most outstanding service provided by the brand. This CRM system is integrated with 40 other products of the company and more than 300 third-party applications. It is a real catch for businesses of any size that want to automate and streamline their communications with clients using advanced marketing features. Zoho interface is pretty straightforward and the company provides a smooth onboarding process along with consultations to make your work with the CRM stressless. Zoho allows companies to save time automating routine repetitive tasks, follow up leads effectively based on pre-defined conditions, enhance lead nurturing, reveal patterns in customer behavior, improve your workflow automation with Zia Intelligence for higher sales, and monitor your productivity with the help of real-time reports and predictions for the future.
Let’s consider the most prominent features of Zoho CRM.
- Effective lead management (capturing leads, automated scoring, predicting leads that are likely to convert);
- Sales process builder;
- Processing rules that help assign leads to sales reps and work with them effectively;
- Receiving alerts each time a user interacts with a brand (read your email, mention your company on social networks, or browse your website);
- Call scheduling and saving call logs after every interaction;
- Zia Intelligence helps you note important data, predict sales opportunities, improve workflows, and detect anomalies;
- Zia Voice (a conversational assistant ready to help with any issue);
- Customer segmentation;
- Sending targeted email campaigns;
- In-depth analytics on your sales performance.
Below you can see the deals in Zoho CRM shows as a Kanban board.
How much does Zoho CRM cost?
Zoho CRM provides a forever free plan and also offers a 15-day free trial for clients who choose Standard, Professional, Enterprise plan, and a 30-day trial for an Ultimate plan. A forever-free plan is available for up to 3 users. All basic features are available but you can’t try sales forecasting, salesSignals, scoring rules, reminders, active blueprints, and the options of Artificial Intelligence. Analytics is unavailable as well.
The cheapest pricing plan starts at €14 for one user billed annually and €20 per user if billed monthly. For this price, you can use sales forecasting, multiple currencies, scoring rules, reminders, and get some basic reports. AI is still unavailable. You can evaluate the power of AI within the Enterprise pricing plan which costs €40 per user per month if billed annually and €50 per user billed monthly.
HubSpot CRM
HubSpot CRM is the flagship of the HubSpot brand. This company was one of the first ones to provide a unified platform for automating marketing, sales, and customer service. It would be a great choice for small and medium businesses that don’t want to hire tech-savvy marketers. This is an all-in-one toolset that offers a CRM and a CMS system; email marketing, social media, and blogging platform; analytics software, and landing page opportunities. So, if you are a small business that has great prospects for growth, consider HubSpot.
HubSpot is famous for its user-friendly design and interface. Besides, the service requires no training before using it, so it’s a perfect choice for beginners. HubSpot CRM provides the necessary features to enhance your marketing, sales, and customer service efforts in one place. You can convert site visitors into leads and clients, automate inbound marketing campaigns, put time-consuming tasks on autopilot, get valuable insights into your prospects, close deals in no time, communicate with clients effectively, handle their feedback, and turn them into your loyal customers.
Now let’s consider HubSpot CRM features.
- Automated updating of sales activities and deals;
- The ability to record all the calls, emails, and notes on a contact’s timeline;
- The opportunity to view the sales pipeline of each customer with a customizable deal dashboard;
- Alerts notifying of different client’s actions (opens an email, click the link, downloads the file);
- Engagement notifications;
- Live chatbot;
- Automated email sending;
- Meeting scheduling;
- Prospect tracking;
- Ticketing system;
- Task management;
- Automated client’s data capture;
- Advanced analytics dashboards.
Below you can see the HubSpot CRM dashboard and a contact card.
How much does HubSpot cost?
HubSpot CRM is absolutely free. You can use email marketing options, ticketing features, deal management opportunities, and sales reporting for free. If you need to exceed the limits, you can purchase individual hubs or get some customized solutions on request. Generally, the more customized experience you need, the more you pay. Pricing plans start at $45 per month if paid annually.
Close.io
Close.io is a CRM system that helps startups, small and medium-sized businesses ensure transparency for their team and bring communication with clients to the next level. The CRM allows users to convert more leads into clients and communicate with customers via emails and calls. The company provides a wide choice of sales automation opportunities that require no technical skills or training.
Let’s take a look at the most important features of the Close CRM.
- Advanced calling platform (Close Predictive Dialer allows users to call multiple contacts at once and route the call to an available rep; you can customize call settings, forward, transfer, and record calls);
- Automated follow-ups with the help of email sequences;
- Built-in SMS service;
- Video calling;
- Smart Views for the most important leads that allow you to find data about any lead within seconds;
- Measure individual and entire team performance with customizable reports.
Close.io allows users to make 300+calls per day. You can leave important notes on each call on the contact card. Look below.
How much does Close.io cost?
Close.io doesn’t have a free plan but it provides a 14-day free trial. There are 4 pricing plans available. The Starter plan costs $29 per month per user. Withing this pricing plan, you can invite up to 3 users; have up to 2, 500 leads, 1 pipeline view, up to 5 email templates, and custom fields. The next pricing plan is Basic and it costs $69. It allows you to invite up to 30 users.
Freshsales (Freshworks)
Freshworks CRM is one of the products provided by the company. It allows small and medium businesses to shorten their sales cycle and have a 360° view of customers. An intuitive service interface makes it a perfect choice for beginners. Freshworks provides its customers with contact management opportunities, cloud telephony, deal management options, email integration, Artificial Intelligence opportunities to predict sales, and powerful reports. Using this service, you can blow up sales with the help of automation, contact clients across different channels, and sell via your phone.
Let’s consider the vital features of Freshworks CRM.
- Lead scoring tool to identify the most engaged leads;
- Custom roles and permissions;
- Auto-assignment rules;
- Sales sequences allow users to create several touchpoints with clients via calls, emails, SMS, and reminders;
- Holiday routing allows companies to route calls on holidays;
- Auto-profile enrichment;
- Communication with clients via multiple channels: email, SMS, WhatsApp, phone, chat, Zoom, Apple Business Chat;
- Multiple sales pipeline with unique stages;
- Freddy AI provide insights on the most promising deals for you to make the best decisions and forecast sales;
- Sales activity and custom reports.
Below is the profile of a contact on Freshworks CRM. You can see how soon the deal is likely to close and the lead’s data.
How much does Freshworks cost?
Freshworks provides a free plan that allows companies to communicate with leads via chat, email, and phone. It offers contact and account management, customizable lifecycle stages, and 24/5 support.
There are 3 pricing plans: Growth ($18 per user per month billed monthly), Pro ($47 per user per month billed monthly), Enterprise ($83 per user per month billed monthly).
Choose the service that fits your business or give a try to several CRM systems to make the right decision!