Need Your CRM Recommendations

[JoyHawkins]

I'm looking around for a kick-butt CRM and want your recommendations! These are some of the features I want it to have:

- The ability to assign multiple reps (in different departments) to clients
- The ability to run reports based on these reps
- The ability to see what products they bought and the dollar amounts of those products
- The ability to help calculate things like retention ratio and $ sold by product
- The ability to integrate an email marketing platform to automate lead nurturing
- The ability to separate prospects from clients
- The ability to set followup dates for prospects that will send reminders


I might think of more but those are the main things.

 

[JoshuaMackens]

Also interested in hearing about these things.

Right now our automatic lead nurturing is done in Zendesk but that won't last much longer.

Would also love something that integrates with Stripe and Gravity Forms to have info pulled into the system as soon as something is paid.

 

[Adam Potaznik]

I have been thinking about this for a long time. I have decided that I want to do it properly, go big or go home.

So in the beginning I was considering some smaller packages like Nimble (social CRM) or Zoho or Nutshell or something else. There are so many around now.

If you want something cheap, check out Bitrix24. It is feature rich and even has telephony features: https://www.bitrix24.com/features/

However, when Microsoft bought LinkedIn a few weeks ago, I spent the whole weekend doing a deep dive and I realised that this acquisition is ENORMOUS. Whilst Salesforce is the current market leader with 20% market share vs 4.5% for Dynamics however I think Dynamics CRM is going to make a big dent in the overall market share against Salesforce and the "Others" (all besides Oracle, SAP, Adobe).

Firstly, read this article about the new change from Dynamics CRM to Dynamics 365, especially the image titled "A Single Source of Truth" Dynamics 365 - Is there substance to the hype? - The CRM Team

Here are the main bullet points I have gathered since that weekend:

• Microsoft have the best stack of technology besides Amazon Web Services
• They are the only CRM with their own geo-spatial and mapping department (Bing)
• They are the only CRM with their own AI / voice recognition department
• Dynamics CRM is In Gartner's top quadrant
• Tightest MS Office 365 integration including Onenote which I use a lot
• Tightest Lync / Sykpe integrations
• You have PowerBI for Busines Intelligence
• Unified Service Desk let's you have a customised agent desktop and can handle multiple line of business apps at once
• They bought Parature for their Zendesk/Freshdesk platform
• They bought FieldOne for Field Service Management
• They bought LinkedIn for social network
• They launched Planner, which is a Project Management Lite like Trello and Asana
• Two days after the LinkedIn purchase they acquired Wand Labs for their chatbot technology - the CEO previously invented Google Now
• They also partner with InsideView for sales (free) for gathering intelligence on leads via CRM, Social and contact data
• They partner with PandaDocs (paid) for document control
• They function with CTI providers like 3CX and others for Contact Centres
• Which allows faster use of knowledge base: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/crm/2016/05/30/automating-agent-actions-with-cognitive-services-speech-recognition-in-usd/
• Office 365 Groups let you collaborate with people without CRM licenses, and still use Onenote, Onedrive, Outlook, Yammer and Calendar.
• They have released Microsoft Flow for IFFT and Zapier like features
• Lots of developers in the developing world who you can find on Upwork and similar freelancing platforms

There is also a wide variety of addons from developers for examplehttps://connectandsell.com/products/lightning/ and Microsoft Dynamics Partners with InsideSales.com | Press Release for example, and going back to the first article I linked to, the new AppSource platform should provide an opportunity for more integrations.

I think I also read somewhere that Satya Nadella, the current CEO of Microsoft came up through the Dynamics division

https://news.microsoft.com/2016/06/13/satya-nadella-email-to-employees-on-acquisition-of-linkedin/

Now it's not cheap, especially if you use some of the addon modules, however if your business model is sound then the benefits should outweigh the costs. Also, the pricing is going to change when Dynamics 365 comes out, it might go down so as to induce more uptake.

Personally I am yet to use it, just watched a heap of YouTube and read a lot, but I am ready in the next week to sign up for a 30 day trial and import some data, as I am starting to do some outbound sales calls.

If you have an IT background and can sell 50 seats for Office 365 or 5 seats for Dynamics then you can get this "Action Pack" which will give you about $8000 of value for $475, which includes 5 licenses for Dynamics for a year. This is great value: https://partner.microsoft.com/en-US/membership/action-pack

Don't dismiss the fact that they are right at the top of the list of CRMs who will be first to market with chatbots/AI/mapping solutions. My dream is to replace all the Bing stuff and integrate Google and other Local data and APIs into Dynamics. If anyone wants to help co-fund some development in this area then please message me

 

[Linda Buquet]

Wow Adam. Thanks for the detailed reply!

I'll Tweet this again Monday AM and see if we can get more feedback.

 

[Tim Colling]

Joy - Have you decided on a new CRM? If so, would you mind sharing what you decided?

Thanks!

 

[JoyHawkins]

Tim,

Not yet! So many to choose from

 

[JoshuaMackens]

I'm currently looking at Hubspot and Hatchbuck.

Any opinions?

 

[bower_au]

I am currently using Pipedrive, for us it's primarily used as a Lead Mgt & Sales tool, but it can be used as a CRM and allows you to track all the data you listed.

It has multiple integration options for email marketing + other add-ons that are pretty cool.

Also pretty cheap to buy extra seats for your Reps.

Only thing that might be missing is the Client vs Lead part, but you can simply build a new pipeline for your clients with different end goals, such as resigns, upsells etc...

Well worth a look & if you use my link you get an extra four weeks in your trial

 

[Kristen]

Hi Joy,

I'm not sure if it ticks all your boxes, but we have a client who uses Infusionsoft as their CRM. It's a very robust system they mainly use for marketing, but it can do much more than that.

The best benefit of Infusionsoft in my opinion is the campaign/lead nurturing capabilities and segmentation options they give you. It was built to integrate with multiple sales reps so it may tick most of your boxes, but just wanted to throw this suggestion out there since the marketing aspect of this CRM is so powerful.

Thanks,
Kristen

 

[Tim Colling]

Joy - Did you ever decide upon a new CRM to use?

 

[JoyHawkins]

No, it kinda got back-burnered :/