Pipedrive has been around since 2010 and has reached ‘Unicorn Status’ as a startup valued at over $1.5 billion in 2020. Over 95,000 sales teams have used the platform and it was listed in the Forbes Cloud 100.

Of course, this shows that Pipedrive is doing something right, but how good is Pipedrive CRM and what does it offer?

To date, Pipedrive has fared really well in the CRM market and their latest AI and automation tools bring some further innovation and excitement to the table.

In this review, we’ll be taking a closer look at Pipedrive and its features and benefits.

Pipedrive: What is the Pipedrive CRM?

As many will already know, CRM stands for customer relationship management. CRMs allow businesses to manage their customers, leads and sales funnel – this is their primary function.

Prospecting and tracking leads from inception through to closure and repeat business is one of the chief pain points for businesses in any sales-oriented industry. CRMs address this pain point, making it far easier to track customers, marketing and sales tasks.

CRMs like Pipedrive organize leads into a sales funnel that allows businesses to track customer relationships in logical fashion.

In principle, this is simple, but as many already know, once leads become disparately organised and poorly managed, keeping track is notoriously difficult.

That’s where a CRM comes in. Pipedrive, fundamentally, is a lead-focussed CRM for sales teams. It will certainly suit marketing teams and virtually any sales-focused small business, startup, SME or SMB.

Does it have the teeth for enterprise-level businesses? Possibly, but that’s probably not where Pipedrive excels. This is a focussed, streamlined and lean tool that is extremely intuitive, effective and efficient to use.

Pipedrive CRM Core Features

Pipedrive allows businesses to track the chronology and progression of their leads and deals.

When you start using the software, you’ll be taken through a 7-step onboarding process that prompts you to:

• Important your customer data from a spreadsheet, Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho and more
• Sync your email accounts; Gmail, Outlook and other major providers are supported
• Setup chatbots and website forms on your site to capture more leads
• Sync deal calendars

Of course, you can skip anything you’re unable to do immediately.

The main strength of Pipedrive is displaying your sales funnel with simplicity, depth, and customization. That means managing your leads, including auto-tagging them from your leads database or emails, and tracking them from initial contact through to conversion and then repeat business.

The software helps you organize hot deals and rotting deals, providing guidance on when to renew your efforts with an established lead whose interest is waning.

You can create customized funnel fields and tag leads to different sales reps or employees.

Pipedrive is collaborative software, so multiple users can track deals from the same view. There are also extensive options for setting employee permissions that restrict access to business-critical information, personal information, or classified leads.

Sales Pipeline View

Pipedrive, as the name suggests, has a pretty classic sales pipeline/funnel view that organizes lead relationships from start to finish. It’s easy to start adding leads and setting deadlines, adding details, assigning tasks to reps, etc. You simply drag and drop your leads from one part of the sales pipeline to another, somewhat like a Kanban board. You can create multiple pipelines, e.g. one for prospecting new leads and one for post-sales support.

Contact Timelines enable reps and employees to visualize when a lead has been contacted, allowing them to see when to contact them next with new deals or follow-ups. There’s a Mail tab that syncs up relevant emails to and from each lead.

Scheduling new activities is extremely simple. The linear, logical UI is a joy to use and doesn’t require in-depth training to learn. The accessibility of the software combined with its competitive pricing is a boon for smaller businesses.

Productivity and Organisation

Pipedrive doubles up as project management software. You can collaborate with your team, assigning and tracking deadlines, maintaining to-do lists, goals, and more. The calendar view makes deadline tracking simple. This is great to see – modern CRMs need productivity and team management tools like this integrated in the same app – they’re especially important for remote work.Another excellent feature for general sales management and organization is the Product Catalogue. This allows businesses to itemize their products into the software. A simple but useful feature.

Email and Contacts

You can integrate your business emails from Outlook or Gmail with Pipedrive, tagging clients for automatic import into the software. Emails sync up efficiently to the software, letting you monitor and analyze email conversations from within the pipeline view.

The Smart Contacts feature here is really impressive, allowing businesses to automatically crawl the web for publicly available information about their contacts. Smart Contacts searches Google, LinkedIn profiles, other web listings, and many public online databases and sources. It’s an intelligent feature that can provide immediate intel on a lead.

Managing emails is very easy and there’s plenty of scope for email automation here too. There are tons of email templates included in the software – these make it simple to keep in regular contact with leads, past and present, whilst also helping businesses visualize when they haven’t heard back from a lead and/or are sending too many unanswered emails, etc.

Stats and Reporting

Statistics and reporting were some of Pipedrive’s weaker points, but this has improved. All the basics are covered, like forecasting, tracking, and comparing past and present sales data to gain a detailed picture of sales performance throughout time.

There are 4 main reporting features:

• Deals
• Revenue
• Activities
• Leads – which is currently ‘coming soon’

‘Deals’ helps you monitor customer churn, helping businesses analyze their customer lifecycle. Revenue is self-explanatory, allowing decent but basic tracking of deals revenue over time. ‘Activities’ is for reporting, analyzing, and tracking everything else, like emails, demos, calls, or events.

It’s possible to pull up a plethora of lead and deal stats, breaking down the value of deals with other key information. This data can be analyzed using AI-powered intelligence tools, namely the AI Sales Assistant which can reveal actionable sales insights.

For example, a business may be putting too much time into lower-value deals whilst the higher-value deals go largely unmonitored. The same could be true in reverse – focussing too much effort on a handful of higher-value clients may mask the value of other potential prospects. The AI Sales Assistant is designed to uncover these situations and provide alerts on how to address them.

Pipedrive CRM Advanced Features

Prospecting Leads

Formerly, Pipedrive was criticized for not providing enough features to actually prospect and create leads in the first place. This has changed in recent years via the integration of the Leadbooster.

The Leadbooster has 4 primary features:

Prospector: This helps businesses find outbound leads from Pipedrive’s own database of some 400 million profiles and 10 million companies. It works on a credit system – more on that shortly. Basically, you can use this tool to reveal leads with verified emails, phone numbers, and even social profiles. This is an impressive tool and the B2B database provided is quite phenomenal, but it will cost you. Firstly, you’ll need the Prospector add-on, and then you’ll need the credits themselves that cost around $1 each depending on how many you buy each month.

Chatbot: Pipedrive provides a chatbot that engages with website visitors, saving them as leads. It’s an AI-powered chatbot that also prompts businesses when human contact is required. This obviously yields its own value for dealing with customer service queries. The chatbot is easy to add to sites and features plenty of customization options for automating different response trees and playbooks.

Live Chat: Similarly to above, the live chat function can be operated by human customer service agents from a computer or mobile.

Web Forms: Inbound leads can use web forms to share their contact details and their information is instantly uploaded into the funnel. The forms are easy to customize for most CMSs like WordPress, Wix, etc. Web forms can also be analyzed for their click-through rates and other important metrics.

Security Centre

Due to the acute relevance of private and public data to CRMs, security is paramount. Recent regulation and legislation such as GDPR makes compliance even more important.

The Security Centre is fortunately fully equipped to deal with the rigors of modern data privacy and internal and external data governance. Due to the sensitivity of data stored within Pipedrive, they have appointed a Data Protection Officer and have worked hard to ensure GDPR compliance on their end.

They also provide two-factor authentication, account lockdown features (in case of a serious data breach), and numerous permissions settings, as mentioned. Data can be backed up daily and is encrypted on Pipedrive’s server.

Integrations and Apps

Pipedrive provides native Android and iOS apps for tablets and smartphones. Syncing contacts with Outlook and Gmail is simple. There are some 275+ other third-party integrations with the likes of Xero, Trello, Zapier, Mailchimp, Asana, Slack, PandaDoc, and Pipechimp. This allows Pipedrive to be integrated into existing project management workflows as a more dedicated CRM tool. Integrations like Xero make accounting easy, allowing users to sync their deals and financials to the Xero accounting platform. There’s also an open API for advanced connectivity.

How Pipedrive can Benefit your Business

Pipedrive is a streamlined, focussed, and intuitive CRM for sales teams. It performs very well in its primary role – breaking down and organizing the state of leads throughout the sales funnel. Of course, this benefits both sales and marketing teams, due to the integration of email marketing tools.

In a nutshell, Pipedrive provides the following powerful features:

• Providing a powerful but logical way to organize and track leads throughout the sales funnel
• Collaborate and delegate tasks to different team members and reps, or automate email marketing campaigns
• Track leads after initial deals have been closed and focus on repeat business
• Collate financial information from leads for reporting and accounting purposes
• Add website features like chatbots and website forms for outbound lead generation
• Access large B2B databases for inbound lead generation

Pipedrive Pricing

Pipedrive prices their software per user per month, which is standard for software of this type. Naturally, that means that more users and bigger teams = greater overall costs.

The Essential tier costs $15 per user per month, when billed each month, or $12.50 when billed annually. The key features you’d be missing out on here are the product catalog, email templates, and integrations with GSuite and other apps.

The Advanced tier then rises to $29 per user per month, discounted to $24.50 for annual billing. You’ll get most core features aside from advanced security features and some reporting features.

Then, there’s the Profesional tier weighing in at a pretty heavy $59 per user per month, or $49.90 when billed annually. It contains all features.

The Enterprise tier is $99 per user per month and requires a minimum of 10 users. It includes custom onboarding and priority support.

The Leadbooster add-on starts at $32.50 extra per company, which isn’t too bad at all.

There is another add-on, the Web Visitors add-on, that costs an extra $49 month-to-month per company. It’s essentially an integrated and augmented version of Google Analytics that syncs up to the software.

Overall, the pricing here is fair for smaller teams on lower tiers but things could get pricey quickly for larger teams that require some advanced features and addons.

Overall, Pipedrive probably sits in the middle range of CRMs as far as cost goes.

Pipedrive CRM: The Verdict

Pipedrive CRM is clearly well-made and optimized for modern digital sales and marketing teams. The developers have worked hard to add some excellent innovative features powered by AI and Big Data, namely the Leadbooster. The B2B database and Smart Contacts features are two stand-outs that ought to surprise some people.

The interface is superb – clear, concise but also customizable. It doesn’t saturate users with too many features, and it isn’t bloated, which counts for a lot when businesses need a simple but smart CRM solution that gets the job done with minimal onboarding, training, and ongoing maintenance.

Overall, Pipedrive does a really good job of fusing simplicity with intelligence. Reporting and forecasting tools as well as tons of integrations top things off, and the security center is easily sufficient for startups, SMBs, and SMEs to handle and govern their data, privacy, and security.

Is it cut out for large-scale enterprises?

Well, considering how large businesses structure their sales teams, Pipedrive would certainly be a good fit for some enterprise sales teams. Whether it could handle colossal volumes of data is maybe a different matter, but we’ve seen no proof to refute its ability to do so.

The post Pipedrive CRM Review appeared first on Software For Projects.

CRM – customer relationship management – is the process of managing the relationship between customers and the business.

Relationships between businesses and customers form at different stages of the sales funnel, starting with discovery and acquisition, progressing to conversions and sales and then hopefully ending up with repeat business.

This complex process can be broken down and visualised using a CRM that assists businesses in managing their sales pipelines. It serves as a database of customers and their contact with one or more business touchpoints, which range from the business website to social media channels, customer feedback forms, apps and even brick-and-mortar stores.

CRMs enable businesses to:

• Organise and store customer and contact data. Save and sort by job title, email, phone number, location, etc.
• Manage contact to and from customers, e.g. via email. Send emails from the CRM ranging from promotional, sales and marketing material to proposals, invoices and more.
• Analyze the health of your customer relationships, e.g. by measuring how often you’re contacting your customers.
• Report on sales and customer relationships using graphs and tables.
• Most CRMs also integrate team or project management tools, e.g. allowing sales and marketing tasks to be assigned to different team members within the CRM.

Top Features of CRMs

Fundamentally, CRMs act as databases of customer data. This customer data can be managed and organized from one central location, allowing businesses to work with a ‘single view’ of their customers across multiple touchpoints.

Modern CRMs do a lot more than that, however. Here are some top CRM features to look out for:

• Customer, contact and lead management; this is the bread-and-butter of the CRM, the database in which customer details and identifiers are saved for management and analysis.
• Deal management; that allow teams to survey customer deals, projects and milestones.
• Email tools; that allow teams to integrate their email services into the CRM for the purpose of sending bulk emails and/or email automation.
• Lead generation; some CRMs contain databases or web-scraping tools for locating new leads and contacts.
• Project management; for assigning tasks, deals, and milestones to different members of the sales or marketing team.
• Customer service; many CRMs have built-in help desks for monitoring customer service queries. Some CRMs also feature telephony tools for making and receiving telephone calls.
• Reporting and analytics; to view stats and graphs on sales data and performance.
• Integrations; CRMs integrate with everything from email and chatbot services to business intelligence platforms, order management systems (OMSs), and much more.

Agile CRM

Agile CRM has built an excellent reputation for its clean and clutter-free interface with deep functionality and plenty of integrations. It covers both standard customer relationship management; deal management, sales tracking, sales funnel analysis, etc, as well as email marketing and customer service.

The heart of Agile CRM is its customer and lead management area. This works as it should do, organizing customer data from various business touchpoints. Each customer can be sorted and organized using preset or custom tags. View a breakdown of each customer’s deals and assign them to different teams to progress different actions, e.g. book appointments, follow-up calls, etc. Social media tools are well-integrated and the telephony and customer helpdesk features are excellent.

Agile CRM is not as advanced as some of its competitors, but this is an advantage for small or mid-sized teams that don’t manage hundreds of thousands of customers. It’s streamlined and purposeful with some innovative extra features, even including a landing page builder and web form, and pop-up builder. Agile CRM offers all your usual integrations with email services, GSuite apps, etc.

Agile CRM allows users to:

• Manage contacts and deals in a streamlined interface
• Connect and manage multiple customer touchpoints, e.g. from social media
• Assign milestones, projects, and deals to team members
• Manage email marketing
• Build landing pages and other digital collateral

Pricing

Agile CRM has a free version for up to 10 users. From there, it’s $8.99 per user per month for the Starter, which lacks some features like the helpdesk. The Regular tier is a big jump to $29.99 and the Enterprise level is $49.99 per user per month. All of these prices are when billed in one go for 2 years. They’re almost double if billed each month.

TRY AGILE CRM

Pipedrive CRM

Having reached ‘Unicorn Status’ as a startup valued at over $1.5 billion in 2020, Pipedrive has surged through the ranks of CRMs to become one of the most advanced products in the industry. Namely, Pipedrive incorporates several AI-powered tools for populating leads with contact info, finding leads using web scraping, and uncovering problems with sales pipelines and deals.

Pipedrive has all the basics covered too, allowing businesses to manage their customers and contacts across multiple channels. Email marketing tools are well-implemented, allowing users to send bulk emails to their customers via the app. Pipedrive even comes with its own chatbot service that can be integrated onto a business’s website and routed to the app.

One of Pipedrive’s headline features is its Leadbooster that comes with a Prospector tool that works similarly to Nimble’s Prospector. This allows users to search for new leads via Pipedrive’s web-scraped database. Businesses can also use Pipedrive to build customized web forms for placement on-site or through other channels.

Pipedrive’s AI sales assistant analyzes sales data and deals to auto-suggest tips and tricks for preventing deal rot and other sales problems. It may seem like a gimmick but provided Pipedrive is set up properly, it’s reportedly very effective.

Pipedrive allows users to:

• Organize and manage leads and customers alongside social media information
• Leadbooster to help prospect new leads
• AI-powered sales assistant
• Chatbot integration
• Powerful email marketing tools

Pricing

Pipedrive is $15 per user per month when billed monthly for the Essential tier. This rises through $29 for Advanced, $59 for Professional, and $99 for Enterprise. The Leadbooster tools are an extra $32.50 for the entire company, but there is a credit system similar to Nimble.

TRY PIPEDRIVE CRM

Salesforce

Ranking the number 1 most popular CRM for some 7 consecutive years, Salesforce is a real behemoth that comes stacked with advanced CRM features. In fact, for small businesses, Salesforce almost definitely goes too far beyond the standard expected CRM feature set – it’s best for medium or enterprise-level businesses that take advantage of its many features.

Salesforce has all the basics covered, allowing unprecedented organization and control of vast customer data across multiple sales and marketing channels. Salesforce integrates directly with its own order management system and other Salesforce tools, truly allowing it to be an all-in-one tool for businesses that wish to move their systems to the Salesforce ecosystem.

Some advanced features include the Flow Manager which allows users to create advanced process automation. There are plenty of options for setting permissions, e.g. to restrict some employees from gaining access to certain customer data or deals.Advanced reporting tools allow businesses to quickly view and analyze their sales data and pipeline health. Customizable dashboards ensure that team members and higher management are informed of their projects and milestones.

Salesforce allows users to:

• Organize multi-channel customer data and contacts in unprecedented detail
• Advanced integrations with first-party and third-party tools, e.g. order management systems
• Flow Manager for process automation
• Powerful email marketing tools
• Ability to set permissions for employees/teams

Pricing

Salesforce charges $25 per user per month for their lowest-level option for 10 team members max. This then jumps right up to $75 per user per month, $150 per user per month, and $300 per user per month. The more expensive versions allow access to Salesforce’s advanced marketing, analytics, and customer service tools.

TRY SALESFORCE

Nutshell

Nutshell is another modern and innovative CRM that is probably aimed more towards small and mid-sized teams. It has a super-crisp, quality UI which is easy to use with plenty of advanced features under the hood.

At the core of Nutshell are its customer and lead management platform that does everything one would expect it to do. Customers and leads can be organized, sorted, and assigned off to different team members for onboarding, management, booking follow-up calls, etc.

Calls, appointments, and emails can be assigned with automatic reminders. Email marketing is well-implemented, allowing users to send bulk emails to customers. Social media marketing and management tools are well-integrated too and the dashboard can be tweaked and tuned with different filters. Nutshell offers plenty of integrations with business intelligence tools, email marketing services, GSuite, and more.

The drag-and-drop pipeline management tool is augmented by a map view that allows businesses to sort their customers by geographical location. Nutshell’s lead tracking tools are excellent and suit small client-based businesses extremely well, though they might not suit businesses with many thousands of customers as well.

Nutshell allows users to:

• Manage customers, leads, and contacts with multiple views such as map and Kanban
• Advanced pipeline management for tracking deals as they progress through the sales process
• Built-in email marketing features
• Tons of powerful reporting and analytics tools
• Team management tools with customizable dashboards

Pricing

Nutshell’s simple and fair pricing starts at $19 per user per month for the Standard tier, rising to $35 per user per month for Pro. Pro adds sales automation and reporting tools amongst other features. It’s one of the cheaper products on the market – simple pricing benefits small and mid-sized teams the most.

TRY NUTSHELL

Nimble

Nimble CRM is very well-suited to small to mid-sized teams that manage high-value clients and customers. At its core, it’s a powerful CRM that allows for granular tracking of contacts across multiple sales channels and touchpoints. Advanced sales funnel analysis combines with quality data segmentation tools to accurately break down customers depending on where they’re located in the sales funnel.

One standout feature of Nimble is the Today dashboard which displays all daily relevant data in one easy-to-read section. Instantly home in on pending tasks, deals, marketing tasks, etc. Each contact can be displayed alongside their social media info (Facebook and LinkedIn sadly no longer allow this, though), allowing users to gain instant insight into their high-level contacts.

Another of Nimble’s advanced features is the Prospector tool which essentially acts as a web-scraping tool. This automatically pulls up potential lead data as you surf the internet, e.g. when browsing a website or social media page. It’s a powerful and innovative tool that works extremely well for cultivating cold leads.

Nimble is probably best suited to businesses with sets of high-value leads that require more detailed management, but it can handle larger customer datasets too. Nimble is also equipped with plenty of integrations for connectivity to business intelligence tools, email marketing platforms, GSuite apps, time-tracking, and more.

Nimble allows users to:

• Organize and segment customers and contacts in great detail
• Find social media information on current and prospective leads
• Discover more leads with the Prospector tool
• Powerful dashboard that displays daily relevant information
• Comprehensive email marketing tools

Pricing

Nimble charges a flat $25 per user per month when billed monthly. The Prospector is included but requires Enrichment Credits to use. Teams get a number of these each month but more can be purchased from the app.

TRY NIMBLE

Summary: 5 Easiest to Use CRMs

These 5 CRMs represent the latest and greater in customer relationship management. Needless to say, each one covers the basics in excellent fashion, simplifying the way businesses organize and manage their customer’s data and contact information.

With email marketing tools, deal management, and reporting, and analytics, customer data can be managed efficiently and effectively to maximize deal turnover, repeat business, and ROI.

Some of these CRMs, namely Nimble and Pipedrive, come with their own lead-prospecting tools. These are essentially web scraping tools that allow users to prospect new leads when surfing the internet (or by accessing a database in Pipedrive’s case).

Aside from the accomplished and innovative Nimble and Pipedrive, small and mid-sized teams are well-suited by Nutshell and Agile CRM. Salesforce is definitely the heavyweight option and boasts the most integrations, customizability, and Enterprise-level security and data governance tools.

The post 5 Easiest To Use CRMs appeared first on Software For Projects.

They can help you maintain and improve customer relationships, resolve customer problems, and maintain a record of all customer interactions.

Although CRM tools are mostly about improving customer relationships, modern CRM software will often include additional functionality for managing other parts of a business.

This can include sales, marketing, content management, social media, customer service, telephony, and time tracking tools, just to name a few.

The diversity of CRM tools can make it difficult to choose the right product, particularly if you are a designer or run a design agency.

To make your decision easier, this guide will share some tips for choosing the right CRM for your design business.

We’ll also list the 5 best CRMs for designers and design agencies.

What Functionality Do Designers Need in a CRM?

Before choosing a CRM, it’s important to spend some time thinking about the functionality that your business needs.

If your design business is in a growth phase and is receiving a lot of sales leads, you may need a CRM with strong lead tracking functionality.

If your business is already well established and has a stable roster of clients, perhaps you need stronger customer service tools.

New businesses might benefit from using CRM software with powerful marketing tools.

In almost all cases, designers and design agencies will benefit from choosing a CRM that includes:

• Client Database Tools – A database that stores client contact information, including their email addresses, phone numbers, along with details of client interactions. It must also be capable of storing custom fields for information like website URLs, domain name registrar details, passwords, domain renewal dates, and so on.
• Help Desk and FAQ Functionality – Design agencies often provide support to clients. Having this type of functionality available makes it easier for a design business to track and assign customer support requests.
• Marketing Tools – Some CRMs come with tools to create, manage, and track the success of marketing campaigns. They often provide integration with other advertising, marketing, and analytics platforms.
• Sales Pipeline Tools – A sales pipeline is a snapshot of where a prospect is in the sales process. It helps you keep track of your leads as you learn about their project, discuss the potential of working together, prepare quotes and so on. It makes the sales process much easier to manage and can dramatically improve conversion rates.
• Internal Communications Tools and Task Assignments – These tools are particularly useful for fostering productivity within larger design teams. Some CRMs will also include time tracking functionality, which makes it easier to accurately bill clients.

The following products have excellent usability, functionality, and extensibility, which makes them ideal for designers and design agencies.

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1. PipeDrive

PipeDrive is a powerful CRM which is perfect for design agencies interested in acquiring more clients.

Features

It uses an intuitive drag-and-drop interface to track the status of sales prospects and their position along the sales pipeline. This feature reduces the amount of time spent on administrative sales tasks and improves the productivity of both the design and sales teams.

Some of the other useful features included in PipeDrive are:

Communications tracking

PipeDrive has automated tools for tracking calls, emails, and in-person client contacts. The email sync, email open notifications, call logging, call recording, and group email features will ensure that every piece of important information is recorded in the CRM. The activity calendar and scheduler make it easy to assign tasks and notify others of your availability.

Workflow automation

The team at PipeDrive has done an excellent job at creating workflow automation tools. Users can automate virtually any repetitive task in the sales process by setting triggers and desired actions. The AI-powered sales mentor monitors your activity and suggests when automation would be appropriate. It’s a great productivity booster.

Mobile apps and integrations

PipeDrive has apps for both iOS and Google Android devices. These apps can sync with a variety of tools including Google Calendar, iCloud, and Outlook to ensure all calendars, messages, and tasks are up to date. An Apps marketplace has integrations for over 150 other services, including Dropbox, Xero, Trello, PandaDoc, and Klenty.

Sophisticated insights and reports

If you like to track the progress of your business, you will enjoy the customizable reports and interactive dashboards provided by PipeDrive. They will help you understand which marketing approaches are most effective, how many leads are being converted each month and much more.

Bottom line

PipeDrive is a powerful CRM system with a focus on sales. It’s pipeline management, sales reporting, customizations, communications tracking, and contact management are all excellent making it perfect for your design agency. It also has G Suite integration.

The only downside of this platform is that it is slightly limited in terms of project management. This limitation can be overcome by using a third-party project management app like Trello.

Visit Pipedrive

2. OnePage CRM

OnePage CRM is a cloud-based sales automation CRM that has been specifically created for designers and design agencies. Although it is a powerful application, its excellent usability makes it simple for the average user to accomplish virtually any task.

OnePage CRM is a comprehensive platform which can handle a wide variety of tasks. It’s extensibility also lets you improve certain aspects of its functionality, so you can modify it to meet your agency’s requirements. It is available as an online app or a native mobile app available for Android and iOS devices.

Features

Some of the best features of OnePage CRM include:

Action streams

An “action stream” is a type of todo list which involves a series of specific actions for clients. These streams make it easier to assign tasks and easily understand which task needs to be completed next. It’s a fantastic tool for boosting productivity.

Drag-and-drop pipeline management

OnePage CRM uses a graphical interface for sale pipeline management. It is a drag-and-drop interface, so users can move prospects along the pipeline very easily. Tasks like adding contact details and notes are also easy to achieve using this interface.

Lead clipper feature

The lead clipper feature allows users to capture a lead from sources like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Gmail with a single click. As you see someone who would benefit from your design services, you can turn them into a sales prospect and they will immediately added to your contact list.

Bottom line

Power, yet simple to use, OnePage CRM has become a popular choice amongst agencies interested in increasing their sales. The only downsides may be a lack of invoicing and project management features.

Visit OnePage CRM

3. Nimble

Nimble is a browser and mobile-based CRM developed by Jon V Ferrara, who was a part of the team which created the popular Goldmine CRM. Nimble is a modern CRM with excellent social media tools, which are particularly useful for designers who use social media marketing.

Features

The strongest feature of Nimble is its automated contact management tools. It allows the app to automatically populate customer profiles and contact histories from the data found in emails, contact lists, and social media activity.

This feature makes it simple to develop thorough client profiles, which is useful for sales, customer support, and project management. It can also unify contact data from several sources including Gmail, Mailchimp, Office 365 Calendar, Quickdesk, LinkedIn and more.

Some of the other great features found in Nimble include:

Customisable dashboards

Nimble allows users to create sophisticated dashboards that contain a huge amount of information in an easy to understand format. It can be customised to show the sales pipeline, calendar appointments, design tasks, social media signals, pending projects, and much more.

Many actions can be undertaken directly via the dashboard, including assigning tasks to co-workers, updating a task’s status, adding notes, or creating brand new deals. The business signals widget is particularly useful as it can help you discover many new opportunities for customer engagement.

Informative contact records

One of the best reasons to use a CRM is that you can record all of the contacts between your business and current or prospective clients. Nimble is particularly good at this task as it automatically scans several data sources for updates. This means you will always be aware of the latest client discussions and any new tasks that need to be completed.

Excellent todo list management

Nimble has some great tools for assigning tasks and creating todo lists. Each task or list item can be associated with a project, contact, or company and given a completion date.

Sales pipeline management

Nimble uses the same type of visual approach to sales pipeline management as PipeDrive. You can customise the steps in your pipeline and pull prospects through it step by step.

Bottom line

Nimble is a CRM tool that excels when it comes to social media integration, contact management and prospect identification. Its main downside is that it doesn’t offer much in terms of marketing automation tools.

Visit Nimble

4. CRM Runner

CRM Runner is a sophisticated cloud-based service management system and CRM. Although it is primarily targeted at eCommerce, wholesale, and retail businesses, it can also work well for agencies with several employees.

Features

It has a slightly different feature set compared to the other products included in this list. In addition to having the standard types of features included in a CRM, it has excellent employee management, quoting and invoicing tools.

Some of the key features of CRM Runner include:

Employee management

CRM Runner allows managers to assign tasks, send alerts, and rank users based on recent performance. Designers and salespeople can be assigned to new projects and will immediately be notified by the app.

Customisable dashboards

CRM Runner has a well-designed dashboard system which is highly customisable and contains several innovative features. It is also highly extensible with numerous third-party app integrations available.

Invoicing

CRM Runner is particularly strong when it comes to invoicing. Tracking time spent on a project and invoicing clients becomes simple, which is useful for design firms which struggle with this aspect of doing business. The clock-in/clock-out system also makes it simple for staff to track time, even if working remotely. Payment integration speeds up payments from clients, using platforms like Stripe and PayPal.

Bottom line

A very powerful CRM which is ideal for businesses with several employees. In addition to managing the sales pipeline and client contacts, it helps businesses manage staff and take payments. A fantastic all-round solution.

Visit CRM Runner

5. ZenDesk

ZenDesk is one of the world’s leading cloud-based help desk and CRM solutions. Initially developed as a standalone help desk, the company has expanded the capabilities of the app significantly, making it a comprehensive platform.

The focus of ZenDesk CRM remains on customer support. Their software makes it easy to provide support to clients on any channel, including social media, websites, phone, email, and text SMS. It provides powerful workflows which make it simple for support team members to provide world class services to clients.

Features

Some of the best features of ZenDesk include:

Live chat

The live chat feature lets you take sales enquiries and customer support enquiries via your website or mobile applications. Your business can be much more responsive to requests for assistance, which leads to more conversions and improves customer satisfaction.

Integration with many other applications

ZenDesk works with many other applications, including Salesforce and Google Analytics. The incredible extensibility of the platform means you can alter the platform to meet the specific requirements of your design business.

Knowledge base tools

ZenDesk makes it easy to develop a large knowledge base, which benefits clients and educates prospects about your product. This feature also helps your business develop successful content marketing campaigns.

Bottom line

ZenDesk is a very strong CRM with a focus on customer support. Although it is weaker on a marketing and sales front, its extensibility means you can supplement the core application as necessary.

Visit Zendesk

Honorable mentions

Copper CRM – https://www.copper.com/

Wrapping Up

As you can see, you have many potential CRM solutions to choose from. The key to finding the best CRM software for a design agency is to reflect upon the needs of your business and test several products out before committing to a solution.

The post Best CRM Software For Designers And Design Agencies appeared first on Software For Projects.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software can dramatically improve the way your business interacts with customers and pursues leads.

It can also provide many opportunities for improving customer support and increasing productivity.

However, to fully take advantage of all of the features in a CRM system, you must choose the right product. This can be difficult as there are many CRM products available with a wide variety of different features. Each business also has a unique set of circumstances that can determine which CRM system is ideal.

You can use the directory on Software For Projects to look at the many different CRM software that is available but you first need to be sure to know ones that are most suited to your business.

This how to choose a CRM guide will help you understand the types of functionality included in most CRMs and share a simple process for picking the best CRM for your business.

What Is A CRM?

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a technology that helps businesses manage relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers.

CRM software achieves this goal by recording the details of customers in a central database. This information makes it far simpler for businesses to understand what customers want and to identify sales opportunities.

CRM systems can build value for a business by creating a common client-focused knowledge base which allows the employees to better serve clients. It also opens up vital communication channels within the business, making it easier for teams to collaborate.

Over time, CRM software will help your business understand the buying habits and preferences of your customers and prospects. This information is extremely valuable as it drives sales growth, increases sales opportunities, and provides the ability to offer value-added services to customers.

Some of the many advantages of using a CRM system include:

• Stronger customer relationships
• Easier to ensure customer needs are met
• Improved service delivery processes and product development
• Increased staff awareness of customer needs
• Integrated sales, marketing, and customer service functions
• New sales opportunities
• Reduced customer frustration
• Improved decision making
• Greater employee efficiency and productivity

What Features Do CRMs Typically Have?

The sophistication of CRM tools has dramatically increased over the past decade. In addition to recording customer data, modern CRMs can help with marketing, customer support, the sales pipeline, content management, and much more. All these need to be considered when making your CRM selection.

The functionality contained included in modern CRMs can be split into three main categories:

Sales Force Automation

Many CRMs contain functionality for analysing the sales cycle and managing the sales pipeline. They can track each prospect as they move along the sales pipeline, improving conversion rates and customer satisfaction. Sales automation tools can:

• Ensure your sales team is using their time in the best way possible
• Identify parts of the sales pipeline which need improvement
• Improve lead tracking
• Identify the best performing members of the sales team
• Making it simple for salespeople to find the right sales content for each prospect
• Process quotes and orders more efficiently
• Make it easier for new salespeople to learn sales processes
• Understand which stage of the sales pipeline each prospect has reached
• Track and solve any sales objects or queries from prospects
• Give remote sales staff access to the data and information they need to work externally

Customer Support Automation

CRMs are extremely useful for providing support to customers. They can help your business improve customer loyalty, generate more repeat sales, and improve customer satisfaction. Some of the customer support tools CRMs often include:

• Customer support ticket functionality
• Conversation histories
• Tools for promoting cross-sales and up-sales
• Call centre tools for improved efficiency (automated dialling, call forwarding, call escalation)

Marketing Automation

It is common for modern CRM software to include marketing tools. These tools make it easier for anyone in your organisation to obtain and utilise the most effective marketing materials available. Marketing automation can help businesses:

• Develop and implement marketing campaigns
• Track the effectiveness of marketing campaigns
• Ensure marketing materials remain consistent across the business
• Manage marketing campaign budgets
• Automate marketing material distribution
• Maintain email marketing lists
• Improve the effectiveness of targeted email marketing campaigns
• Develop a personalised approach when marketing to prospects
• Use customer filtering to send highly targeted campaigns

Some all-in-one CRMs will focus on all three areas equally. However, other products will have a deeper focus on a particular aspect, which is useful if you are looking to make significant improvements in a single area.

Steps for Choosing The Right CRM For Your Business

1. Think about the main goals of your business

Identifying the goals of your business will help you determine the functionality you require in a CRM. Consider what you need a CRM solution for today as well as what kinds of features that might be useful as your business grows. Some of the key questions to ask yourself include:

Do you need more leads?

Look for CRM software which has excellent marketing and lead generation tools. CRMs with a lead generation focus include HubSpot, Pardot, Contactually, and SharpSpring.

Does your business need to improve how well it tracks prospects?

If so, you may need a package with advanced sales pipeline tracking, like Salesforce, Pipedrive, or Hubspot Sales.

Are your teams struggling to communicate with one another?

Look for a CRM that has excellent internal communications systems which allow sales, market, content, and support teams to work together more efficiently.

Do you need help with email marketing?

Either choose a CRM with internal email marketing software or one which is easily integrated with a third party provider like MailChimp.

Are you looking for insight into how your business is performing?

Look for a solution which offers advanced analytics data and customisable dashboards.

Is your sales team struggling to convert leads?

Use a CRM which has lead scoring so you can qualify leads more easily, focussing your attention on the right prospects.

Do you want to focus on telemarketing?

Choose a platform which offers advanced call centre tracking.

The large number of CRM applications available means you should have no problem finding a platform that meets your needs.

2. Consider usability

CRM platforms can be extremely sophisticated programs with dozens of features. Unfortunately, if the program’s interface is too complex or it has a steep learning curve, your employees may initially find it difficult to use.

To ensure your employees can use CRM software successfully, look at its interface and consider its usability. Is it intuitive and easy to use or does it look challenging? Consider the technical skill of your employees and how they might adapt to the app.

3. How much does it cost?

It’s a good idea to assess the price of specific CRMs before researching their functionality. After all, there is no point exploring the advanced features of a CRM if it is too costly for your business to afford. There are also different pricing regimes for different products, with some tools having one-off up-front payments while others use monthly/annual subscriptions.

4. Will the CRM provider help with initial setup?

Switching to a new CRM can be a daunting task. Employees will need to learn a number of new user interfaces and work processes. If they can’t get to grips with all of the features that are available, the CRM may not deliver on its promised efficiencies, improvements, and return on investment.

Some CRM providers will offer extensive personalised assistance during these initial learning stages. However, others simply direct you towards a manual. Consider how much help your business may require during the initial setup period and what is provided.

5. What is the quality of customer support?

No product is perfect. You may experience bugs, inconsistencies, or other problems with the CRM after purchase. Consider how much support the CRM provider is willing to offer when these issues occur.

Do they offer free personalised support? Is over the phone support available or is the only option a lengthy user manual? Are there plenty of tutorials for complex procedures or will your employees be forced to search for answers on a website?

6. What marketing tools does it offer?

Over the past decade, most CRM makers have increased the types of marketing functionality available on their platforms. In some cases, CRMs have become so advanced that they can fully replace other types of marketing software and services completely. Consider your current marketing strategy to see if the CRM’s capabilities would be suitable.

7. Does it come with a help desk?

Having a help desk integrated into a CRM can be very useful for businesses who often provide customer support. A help desk makes it easier to process customer requests and ensures that all customers receive the assistance they require. It can also help you identify sales opportunities amongst customer requests, including up-selling and cross-selling opportunities.

8. Is Social CRM functionality available?

Social CRM integrates social media channels with CRM functions. It makes it possible for businesses to link consumers with their social media activities — giving the business much more insight into consumer preferences and requirements.

Social CRM can also help businesses monitor social media activity relating to their brand and interact with prospects via social media. This can be a powerful feature for businesses with an online presence.

9. Does the CRM offer complete contact views?

High quality CRM software will provide a 360 degree view of each contact, allowing your business to see all of the contacts that a prospect or customer has had. This means that your sales team will be able to see previous sales enquiries, support requests, and other contacts from a prospect.

Likewise, your support team will be able to see what other products a customer owns and what their requirements are. This holistic approach feeds more useful information to your teams, leading to better outcomes.

10. How customisable are dashboards?

Most CRMs will use dashboards to give users access to their favourite functionality and the reports they are most interested in. Dashboards can improve productivity and make it easier for employees to carry out day-to-day tasks.

It’s important to note the amount of customisation available for dashboards can vary greatly between CRM system providers. Some CRMs will let users have virtually any report or function on their personalised dashboard while others are quite limited.

11. How sophisticated are its reporting tools?

One of the best reasons to use a CRM system is that it can give you detailed reports on everything from customer satisfaction through to the productivity of your customer support team. However, some CRMs offer more powerful metrics than others. If your team has the knowledge and time necessary to make used of detailed reports, opt for a CRM that has substantial metrics and reporting functionality.

12. Do You Require Mobile Access?

In recent years, it has become much more common for employees to work using mobile devices. If this is the case with your team, opt for a CRM solution that is mobile friendly.

13. Do you require integration with other software?

If you already have telephony applications, marketing platform, or other types of software,  consider choosing a CRM which can be easily integrated with other platforms. This will help you make the most of your CRM.

14. Read some reviews

Reading impartial reviews of a CRM written by other business owners is one of the best ways to accurately assess a product. Websites like G2Crowd, Capterra, and BestVendor have thousands of reviews from real-world users.

Reading these reviews will help you understand how easily specific CRMs can be integrated, what features are particularly useful, how good the provider’s support is, and much more.

15. Contact the vendor with any questions

If you are unsure about the capabilities of a particular CRM, contact the provider. They should be happy to answer any questions that you may have. In many cases, they will offer to give you a demonstration of the capabilities of their product, which will help you understand if it meets your requirements.

The post How To Choose A CRM System For Your Business appeared first on Software For Projects.