What is a CRM? What can you expect of a CRM software?

A CRM (customer relationship management) software will help you manage customers and potential customers, save your time and energy, and let you focus on your business. CRM systems give organisations a single view of the customer and deliver essential insights for service and product development.

Salesforce 

Salesforce is one of the very best CRM software for small businesses. You can use Salesforce to take leads through a personalized customer journey and use the intelligent marketing platform to drive more sales through emails, SMS messaging, social media, and digital advertising.

Salesforce includes advanced features and solutions for everything you could possibly need: sales, marketing, commerce, customer service and engagement, team productivity, and even more.

Features:

• Guided onboarding
• Custom dashboards and reports
• Tracking emails and meetings automatically
• Social media and email support
• Enterprise-level security and ongoing support

Pricing:

Plans for small businesses start at $25/month per user (billed annually).

Zoho

Zoho is a cloud-based software suite built to give you all you need to easily run your small business. You will get a powerful set of marketing and sales features with SaaS apps and online productivity tools.

This easy software helps small businesses organize contacts, market their brand, manage sales, provide customers support and a lot more.

You can use Zoho CRM to integrate with the other marketing tools you already use, capture leads through social media, segment visitors, and offer support using built-in live chat.

Features:

• Multichannel contact management (email, phone, live chat, and social media)
• AI voice assistant for creating intelligent dashboards and forecasting business trends
• Sales lead management (with lead scoring) so you can prioritize leads and convert them faster
• Detailed analytics reports so you can make data-driven decisions
• Mobile apps to keep everyone on the same page, even on the go
• Team collaboration tools and team roles
• IT management for monitoring websites and handling support tickets
• Built-in security measures to keep your data safe

Pricing:

Zoho has a free plan for up to 3 users, but the good features are in the paid plans. Those start at $12/month per user (billed annually).

Pipedrive

Pipedrive is a very user-friendly CRM software that is designed to be simple and fast. Using their pipeline management feature, you get an overview of your entire sales process and can stay in control of it the whole way.

In addition to pipeline management with a clear, visual interface, you will also get email integration, sales reporting and forecasting, and mobile apps so you can access your CRM from anywhere.

Pipedrive does not offer any segmentation, but it is simple enough to make identifying leads and maintaining relationships really easy.

Features:

• Mobile alerts and email reminders
• Easy integration with Google Apps, Trello, Zapier, and more
• API for easy integration with any software
• Email integrations to keep your sales communication is one place
• Email templates
• iOS and Android mobile apps
• Sales forecasting and trend analysis
• Backups and encryption to keep your data secure
• Drag and drop tasks as customers follow the sales funnel

Pricing:

Plans start at $12.50/month per user (billed annually).

HubSpot

HubSpot is hands down the best CRM for small businesses looking for a cost-effective CRM solution when they’re getting started. It’s a great customer database software for managing new leads.

HubSpot is an easy CRM to use and offers a wide range of tools to manage the customer journey. It even offers forever free plans with limited features for their CRM, Marketing, Sales, and Service Hubs.

The CRM has a nice interface, letting you see your entire sales pipeline right on your dashboard. If you want more data (and who doesn’t?), you can view all contact and sales activity, detailed reports, and performance on a user or team basis.

With a clever marketer, you can turn your emails into instant sales reps to increase your bottom line.

HubSpot has a mobile app for both iPhone and Android, email templates, real-time notifications, email tracking, scheduling, phone calls, and more.

It also integrates with more than 300 apps and services like WordPress, email marketing companies, lead generation software. You can also connect HubSpot to Gmail or Outlook to log activity automatically, capturing every single email.

Features:

• Personalize email sequences for leads and existing customers
• Place phone calls right from the CRM
• Get real-time notifications about lead behavior
• Integrate with popular tools like Salesforce, Shopify, and Microsoft Dynamics
• Store unlimited users, customer data, and up to a million contacts
• Integrate 300+ apps
• Create custom filters to sort contacts
• Schedule emails, tasks, and create tickets

Pricing:

The core CRM software is free, but for more powerful features you can upgrade to a paid plan for Marketing, Sales, or Service hubs (starting at $50/month). You can also upgrade to the Growth Suite starting at $113/month for a single user.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Microsoft Dynamics CRM (now known as Dynamics 365) is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software solution that manages all interactions with customers, prospects, stakeholders, and all other contacts for your company.

Dynamics CRM stores all customer interactions in a shared database across your business and manages marketing, customer service, and customer support, all with seamless integration with Outlook and Microsoft Office 365.

The CRM element of Dynamics 365 enables you to manage sales leads, manage sales pipeline and opportunities, generate new leads using the marketing module (app), and provides customers with exceptional service using the customer service (help desk) module.

Users of Dynamics CRM are able to access customer data using either the Cloud SaaS version (using a web browser such as Chrome or Internet Explorer) or by using the on-premise version, where the customer database is deployed on your servers. CRM data can also be accessed via Microsoft Outlook or by using a mobile device.

Dynamics 365 uses SQL server as its core CRM Database which offers unrivalled speed, security, and performance and is one of the pre-requisites to install Dynamics 365.

Features:

• Help you develop better customer relationships
• Improves customer service levels and increases user efficiency levels
• Helps drive sales revenues and profitability.
• Helps teams and individuals maximise customer communications and sales efforts
• Enables greater collaboration between departments. This allows you to spend more time building relationships with customers and improving customer satisfaction levels.

What CRM apps are available for Dynamics 365?

The core modules (or apps) for CRM include Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service, there are also the Field Service and Project Service apps that are designed around automating more specific tasks.

Core CRM apps:

Dynamics 365 Sales – Salesforce automation, sales pipeline, and opportunity management, pipeline optimisation, sales process automation, quotes, and sales literature.

Dynamics 365 Marketing – Campaign management, marketing list management, list segmentation, and marketing reports.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service – Knowledge base, support help desk, service contracts, email management, and auto-response, it also has automated routing.

Other Specific CRM apps:

Dynamics 365 Field Service – Dispatch the right resource at the right time to the right place.

Dynamics 365 Project Service Automation – Manage all customer activities for each project.

Pricing:

Microsoft has changed the way you can purchase individual apps for the CRM element of Dynamics, now you can just buy the app that you require whereas before you would have had to purchase the Customer Engagement plan. Prices are shown below:

• Dynamics Sales app – starts from $65 per user per month.
• Dynamics Marketing app – starts from $750 per month.
• Dynamics Customer Service app – starts from $50 per user per month.
• Dynamics Field Service app – starts from $95 per user per month.

Wrap up

If you choose to use Dynamics 365 CRM, with a unified Power Platform, Dynamics brings together business processes and Office personal productivity apps. Access CRM capabilities across Outlook, Excel, Microsoft Teams, and other familiar tools for an unrivalled, connected experience. However, you can use any CRM that best fits your business requirements, and we, at 365 Digital Consulting, can integrate your CRM software with your Office 365 platform, just by contacting to our team anytime.