Salesforce Head to Head with SugarCRM and ZohoCRM
Does your business have a CRM solution in place? With many offerings like Salesforce, SugarCRM, and ZohoCRM, which one is right for your business? Most businesses have a pieced together sales process through email, spreadsheets, and notebooks. If you are looking for a better solution to get your business sales process firing on all cylinders you should have a CRM solution in place.
So what should I use for a CRM?
There are many offerings in the Customer Relationship Management space and we can not look at them all, this is a review of some of the most common cloud based solutions that we are familiar with. We will review Salesforce, SugarCRM, and ZohoCRM. Each of these solutions offer a cloud based platform and mobile support.
Salesforce
This is probably the most well know crm platform in the cloud. Rightly so as I think the number of Salesforce users is around the 2 million mark. Salesforce is one of the original SaaS companies offering a fully cloud based application for users.
Features at a glance:
- Over 2 Million Users
- Offers Customer Support Tools
- Tracks all steps in your sales process
- Marketing Tools
- Mass Emailing
- Chatter Tool, Chat like tool
- Customization to meet your requirements
- Strong Social Media Integration
- Google Apps Integration
- Web-To-Lead Form Builder
Even though it is one most popular platforms, I am not a big fan. If you are looking to live in your CRM then Salesforce is a good choice, however if your organization is not currently using any type of crm you might find users will be overwhelmed with the number of options available in Salesforce. Setup can be a bit of a process to get rolling.
I believe Salesforce lends itself to the larger organization. The features are amazing but for small teams this can be daunting and if you are going to implement Salesforce be sure to work with a partner to get you started off with some training to speed up the learning curve.
Pricing: $65/User/Month Professional Plan
Rating: 3/5 Steep learning curve and the cost make this a lower rating for the SMB.
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SugarCRM
SugarCRM is a unique platform because you have a cloud based solution or a self-hosted solution. Being open source you have access to customize the interface and database in the back-end. This also provides a large community of 3rd party tools and addons in the Sugar Exchange. One of the features I really liked was its easy to use marketing tools for things like setup of newsletters and email marketing campaigns.
Features at a glance:
- Open Source
- Cloud Based or Self Hosted
- Tracks all steps in your sales process
- Great Marketing Tools
- Mass Emailing
- Customization to meet your requirements
- Some Social Media Integration
- Some 3rd Party Google Apps Support
- Web-To-Lead Form Builder
SugarCRM was quick to get up and running and fairly easy to get your data imported. Good integration with lead capture for your website, however it will take a bit of HTML knowledge to get the forms in place and customized to your liking.
Pricing: $30/User/Month Professional (Billed Yearly)
Rating: 4/5 Great integration with your marketing efforts and the access to the complete system SugarCRM is great tool. The only draw back is limited support of Google Apps and Social Media tools.
ZohoCRM
ZohoCRM is one that is starting to get some traction in the CRM space. We have personally implemented Zoho as our CRM of choice. It has great support for Google Apps and Gmail. The gadgets make it very easy to access your CRM right from Gmail. You can create leads, potentials, and tasks from within Gmail without having to jump back and forth.
Features at a glance:
- Full Sales Force Automation
- Great Lead Management
- Tracks all steps in your sales process
- Integrated Marketing Tools
- Mass Emailing
- Customization to meet your requirements
- Social CRM Tools
- Seamless Support for Google Apps for Business
- Web-To-Lead Form Builder
The marketing tools are somewhat limited and I think if you are wanting to have a tight integration with your marketing then SugarCRM or Salesforce might be a better choice. However if you are looking for seamless support of Google Apps then ZohoCRM is the choice.
Pricing: $12/User/Month Professional Plan
Rating: 4.5/5 ZohoCRM offers great integration with Google Apps which tips the scale in favour of this solution. With the recent update of the interface and the cost to get the SMB started ZohoCRM is our choice for day-to-day sales and customer relationship management
Resources:
¹Customer Relationship Management
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