The primary reason why most companies need a CRM when selling B2B is to improve their sales lead follow-up.
If you are also in that situation, it is highly recommended that you incorporate a reliable sales CRM.
The benefits can be enormous as illustrated by a recent conversation with a small sales team consisting of three individuals. They disclosed that their implementation of a sales CRM resulted in an additional $1 million in sales per year.
With the variety of CRMs available for sales, it can be challenging to determine the specific requirements needed to improve your success rate and productivity.
What features can you expect from sales CRM software?
To better follow up on your leads, a sales CRM software platform can provide 10 core features.
- Visualize your leads in multiple drag-and-drop pipelines
- Send automated email sequences until leads reply
- Automatically enrich leads from both publicly available info and email signatures
- Track the source (and lost reason) of your leads and analyze it
- Get reminded to follow up automatically when leads go inactive
- Track leads with integrated email & website tracking
- Get a live overview of what your leads are doing in an in-app notification center
- Digitize business leads with a built-in business card scanner
- Use email templates within your Gmail inbox to manage leads more productively
- Manage your leads fully from your inbox with a handy email sidebar
How can you determine what is the best sales CRM software for your company?
If you are in need of effective CRM software to organize your sales leads, the mentioned features can greatly enhance both your success rate and productivity. We have conducted thorough research on which platforms provide these features and have provided a comprehensive description of them below.
In addition, it is crucial to consider the larger perspective when evaluating software, as it is necessary to ensure that the system will be utilized by your team. Obtaining a CRM that the sales team does not use would be rather futile.
Best CRM Software for Sales
According to our research, our list includes the best CRM software for sales teams.
- Salesflare
When we inquire our customers about the main use of Salesflare, they typically respond with: to enhance our leads’ follow-up process.
We aim to simplify the process of following up on leads at Salesflare by eliminating the need for you to manually input data in order to keep the system operational. Additionally, we offer numerous built-in automation features to enhance your productivity.
Salesflare, which was established in 2014, is utilized by numerous small and medium-sized enterprises that engage in business-to-business selling, including agencies, consultancies, development houses, and tech companies. It is highly regarded on various review platforms and holds the number one position as a CRM software on Product Hunt, the primary community for product enthusiasts.
It offers tight integration with Gmail and Outlook, eliminating the need to switch between your inbox and sales software when tracking leads. Additionally, it provides convenient features such as integrated email and website tracking, email templates, and email sequences.
Without any more delay, let’s proceed with an examination of how Salesflare compares.
Salesflare offers a wide range of features, which are rated at a perfect 10 out of 10.
- Visualize your leads in multiple drag-and-drop pipelines
- Send automated email sequences until leads reply
- Automatically enrich leads from both publicly available info and email signatures
- Track the source (and lost reason) of your leads and analyze it
- Get reminded to follow up automatically when leads go inactive
- Track leads with integrated email & website tracking
- Get a live overview of what your leads are doing in an in-app notification center
- Digitize business leads with a built-in business card scanner
- Use email templates within your Gmail inbox to manage leads more productively
- Manage your leads fully from your inbox with a handy email sidebar
In order to obtain all of the ten features mentioned above, the pricing needs to be considered.
- $49/user/month (billed annually)
- $55/user/month (billed monthly)
- HubSpot CRM + Sales Hub
HubSpot, established in 2005, began as a marketing automation platform and has since evolved into an all-encompassing platform to simplify marketing automation.
HubSpot’s primary emphasis these days is on providing a comprehensive solution that encompasses marketing, sales, service, and operations. If you prefer to avoid the hassle of using multiple apps and integrating them through tools like Zapier and native integrations, HubSpot could be the ideal choice for you.
To achieve similar functionality as the other sales CRM software in this ranking, you will require two products from HubSpot: its CRM and its Sales Hub.
The pricing for obtaining all these useful features (8 in total) is quite high, starting at $450 per month when billed annually. This pricing is applicable for a minimum of 5 users, as per their requirement.
HubSpot CRM + Sales Hub provides a range of features, scoring 8 out of 10.
- Visualize your leads in multiple drag-and-drop pipelines
- Send automated email sequences until leads reply
- Automatically enrich leads from both publicly available info and email signatures
- Track the source (and lost reason) of your leads and analyze it
- Track leads with integrated email & website tracking
- Digitize business leads with a built-in business card scanner
- Use email templates within your Gmail inbox to manage leads more productively
- Manage your leads fully from your inbox with a handy email sidebar
There are certain features that HubSpot CRM + Sales Hub does not provide.
- Get reminded to follow up automatically when leads go inactive
- Get a live overview of what your leads are doing in an in-app notification center
To obtain all of the above features (8 in total), pricing must be considered step by step.
- $90/user/month (billed annually – minimum 5 users)
- $100/user/month (billed monthly – minimum 5 users)
- Pipeliner CRM
Pipeliner CRM, previously known as Pipelinersales, is a software company that was established in 2009 with the objective of developing improved software specifically designed for salespeople.
Despite the infrequent comparisons made between Salesflare and Pipeliner by individuals seeking improved lead follow-up, we have chosen to include them in this comparison due to their evident focus on sales.
In this comparison, the software stands out for its relatively rich set of features, but it is somewhat outdated and not particularly user-friendly.
Pipeliner’s pricing increases significantly as more functionality is required, making it more suitable for mid-sized companies with ample financial resources.
Pipeliner CRM provides a range of features: 5/10.
- Visualize your leads in multiple drag-and-drop pipelines
- Track the source (and lost reason) of your leads and analyze it
- Get a live overview of what your leads are doing in an in-app notification center
- Digitize business leads with a built-in business card scanner
- Manage your leads fully from your inbox with a handy email sidebar
Pipeliner CRM lacks certain features.
- Send automated email sequences until leads reply
- Automatically enrich leads from both publicly available info and email signatures
- Get reminded to follow-up automatically when leads go inactive
- Track leads with integrated email & website tracking
- Use email templates within your Gmail inbox to manage leads more productively
- Freshworks CRM
Freshworks CRM, which was previously known as Freshsales, is a sales CRM that is developed by Freshworks, the company originally called Freshdesk. The purpose of Freshworks, founded in 2010, is to offer customer service teams a more effective and affordable solution.
Freshworks’ primary advantage lies in its extensive features, which it has achieved by providing a user-friendly interface that surpasses its competitor/predecessor, Zoho, in the same city.
Freshworks CRM offers five out of ten features.
- Visualize your leads in multiple drag-and-drop pipelines
- Send automated email sequences until leads reply
- Track the source (and lost reason) of your leads and analyze it
- Get a live overview of what your leads are doing in an in-app notification center
- Manage your leads fully from your inbox with a handy email sidebar
Freshworks CRM does not offer the following features.
- Automatically enrich leads from both publicly available info and email signatures
- Get reminded to follow-up automatically when leads go inactive
- Track leads with integrated email & website tracking
- Digitize business leads with a built-in business card scanner
- Use email templates within your Gmail inbox to manage leads more productively
The pricing is for obtaining all of the mentioned features (5 features).
- $69/user/month (billed annually)
- $83/user/month (billed monthly)
- Zoho CRM
Zoho CRM is a cloud-based CRM platform designed for businesses of any size. It aids in enhancing productivity and customer relationship management. It provides various channels for support like email, social media, phone, live chat, and in-person meetings. Its features encompass AI-based sales interpretations, predictions, and solutions, process management, workflow automation, lead management, a developer platform, and additional functionalities.
According to our data, the modules that have received the highest ratings are as follows.
- Opportunities/Deals Management — 100
- Products Management — 100
- Social Engagement — 100
- Team Collaboration — 100
- Workflows and Process Automation — 100
Benefits at the top
- Manage Accounts Efficiently: Store profile information in an organized way so that you can access account details, opportunities, notes, tickets, communication history, and more. Check information about a child account directly from a parent account page with the account hierarchy feature.
- Work With Real-Time Data: Get valuable insights on sales data and team performance through prebuilt dashboards. Zoho’s analytics helps keep track of KPIs, filter reports and provide data visibility to your whole organization.
- Optimize Sales Performance: The platform detects and predicts anomalies and offers real-time sales coaching insights using AI. You can define objectives, set KPI-based targets, visualize the scope of achievement, create targeted sales campaigns, and more.
- Boost Automation and AI: The system enables teams to save time by automating routine, time-consuming tasks so they can focus on more complex activities. AI-assistant Zia kicks it up a notch and improves data accuracy, sentiment analysis, and lead prediction scores.
- Improve Mobile Access: Sales reps can use Zoho’s iOS and Android apps to access and update information anywhere and work on the go. Manage records offline, use card scanners, and optimize in-person meetings with geo-location.
Key characteristics
- Sales Campaigns: Create campaigns by manually entering data or bulk importing projects into the CRM. You can merge related sales campaigns under a parent campaign for easier organization. Associate campaigns with other tasks, events, contacts, and deals, and track statistics to determine their effectiveness.
- AI-Based Sales Recommendation: Provide your prospects and clients with cross-sell, upsell, retention, and renewal opportunities at the right time. AI self-learning tool, Zia, analyzes customer data like behavioral patterns, interests, and purchase details to recommend products.
- Sales Forecasting: Gain insight into individual and team performance and compare the current quarter’s sales to the previous one. You can use reports and dashboards to visualize targets and filter forecasts by sales rep, team, or territory.
- Lead Scoring: Assign scores to leads based on demographics and behaviors. The system lets you define scoring rules and allot positive or negative points based on email engagement, survey responses, and social media interactions.
- Journey Designer: Build customer journeys by tying together different processes and third-party apps. You can personalize, automate, and evaluate customer experiences and identify possible bottlenecks.
Restrictions or constraints
- The user interface can be hard to navigate.
- Zoho’s customer support and inquiry resolution aren’t very responsive.
- Automation is limited to the enterprise version.
Based on our data, certain features are not completely supported.
- Automatic Creation of Orders — Not Supported
- Order Segmentation — Not Supported
- Email Verification and Suggestion — Supported With Integrations
- Organization Charts — Supported With Integrations
- Document Conversion — Not Supported
- Dynamics 365 for Sales
Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 for Sales provides comprehensive solutions to enhance sales, optimize performance, and maximize ROI. It facilitates lead tracking, offers customer relationship management, project service automation and management, sales forecasting, and financial tracking. Notably, it is compatible with iOS and Android platforms, and also allows users to work in offline mode when data connectivity is not available.
Modules Ranked Highest Based on Our Data
- Workflows and Process Automation — 100
- Dashboards and Reports — 98
- Opportunities/Deals Management — 95
- Documents Management — 91
- Products Management — 90
Benefits at the top
- Manage Calls Better: Automatic and manual call logging ensures you can map the calls to existing or new leads. Get notified about upcoming and missed calls, schedule phone calls, and view call schedules at a glance.
- Optimize Email Activities: Standard email configuration, as well as important integrations like Gmail and Outlook, help you send and receive emails, associate emails with respective contact records, share quotes, add follow-ups, and make notes. Send individual and personalized emails to campaign members, use prebuilt email templates, or create templates from scratch to send mass emails.
- Get Language and Currency Support: You can set the default currency, define exchange rates, and generate invoices for international clients in their preferred currencies. The platform also offers multiple languages to choose from for the user interface.
- Enjoy AI-Driven Insights: Ensure personalized customer experiences with a 360-degree view, maximize customer lifetime value, automate workflows, and make informed business decisions using AI. Sales reps can react to risks and opportunities promptly with adaptive AI that senses changes in buyer needs and trends.
- Improve Customer Relationships: Get recommendations on how to move sales forward based on customer interaction data, profiles, and insights, and ways to secure a warm introduction. You can personalize sales documents using embedded Office 365 tools and improve sales engagement by combining customer data with survey insights from Microsoft Forms Pro.
Features that are considered most important or fundamental.
- AI-Based Coaching Actions: Use AI to improve sales insights and prioritize leads and opportunities that are most likely to convert. The solution provides actionable feedback and the next best actions. You can track and analyze pipeline changes using deal flow visualization.
- Accounts and Contacts Management: Create, edit, and get a unified view of contacts along with opportunities, deals, and history. Manually add contacts or import them from other systems. You can also associate multiple contacts with one account.
- User Homepage: This feature displays a customizable summary view of details such as assigned tasks, opportunities, gadgets, leads, activities, visualizations, and more. You can use prebuilt dashboard views and lists to get team performance insights.
- Leads Capture: Capture leads from various sources like website inquiries, mailing lists, campaigns, and business card scans. Collect information about contacts and companies from a LinkedIn search, and pull the data into the system.
- Activity Management: Get a quick view and track all activities like calls, appointments, tasks, and emails. The system shows who created which activity and automatically timestamps them.
The text below will be rephrased, preserving the same meaning without adding or removing any information: Constraints.
- Current connector apps such as Mailchimp and DocuSign don’t work as expected.
- Multiple windows and tabs may confuse new users.
- Too many session breaks may disturb workflow.
Based on our data, it is indicated that there are features that are not completely supported.
- Email Verification and Suggestion — Supported With Integrations
- Contract Management — Supported With Integrations
- Automatic Creation of Orders — Not Supported
- Order Segmentation — Not Supported
- AI-Based Anomaly Detector — Not Supported
- Creatio
Creatio is a top-notch CRM platform that streamlines marketing, sales, and service operations for smooth and efficient processes. It provides convenient accessibility on both Android and iOS devices, allowing users to effortlessly update contacts, make calls, and send SMS messages. Notable features encompass contact and lead management, pipelines, dashboards, analytics, and opportunity management.
The modules with the highest ratings, based on our data.
- Quotes, Orders, and Contracts Management — 100
- Team Collaboration — 100
- Workflows and Process Automation — 97
- Leads Management — 91
- Products Management — 90
Advantages at the summit
- Evaluate Sales Efficiency: You can use forecasting to filter and compare sales indicators across time periods. The system monitors how effectively sales reps meet their sales quotas and targets.
- Track Website Behavior: Creatio lets you track and identify lead-generation channels. Monitor marketing campaigns and view details like pages visited, time spent on the site, and website paths.
- Manage Emails Better: Use email templates to deliver personalized communication to various segments. You can integrate with popular email service providers and track deliveries, open rates, spam, and unsubscribers with bulk email analytics.
- Improve Communication: Group customers according to industry, revenue, priority, or based on their choice. Dynamic segments let you filter all accounts you haven’t contacted for over a month.
- Save Time: The system automates various business activities and reduces sales teams’ workload. You can use a drag-and-drop case designer and reference processes to modify and create new automated internal processes.
Key characteristics
- Account Management: Get a 360-degree customer view and access all contacts and accounts from a single database. You can create contact records, view interaction histories, and see contacts on a map.
- Customizable Reports and Dashboards: Track current KPIs and get a complete picture of team performance with real-time reports. The system lets you visualize statistics through charts and lists using drag-and-drop tools.
- AI in Lead Conversion: The “predictive score” feature lets you assess the probability of successful lead conversions on a scale of 1 to 100. Generate sales insights and identify which deals are likely to get stuck in the pipeline.
- Order Generation: Create orders with ready-to-use templates and invoice clients from a single window. You can track order documents, communications, deliveries, and payments.
- Target Management: The system lets you track day-to-day operations and overall performance to analyze employee productivity. Set individual, team, or company sales targets and monitor important indicators like the average number of activities per day.
Restrictions
- It doesn’t provide a built-in telephonic caller.
- Functionality can be slow and has a learning curve.
Based on our data, features are not completely supported.
- Email Verification and Suggestion — Not Supported
- AI in Lead Management — Supported With Custom Development
- AI-Based Anomaly Detector — Supported With Custom Development
- Account Hierarchy — Supported With Integrations
- API Usage Dashboard — Supported With Custom Development
- SAP Sales Cloud
SAP Sales Cloud assists in streamlining various processes, such as contracts, billing, lead management, invoicing, forecasting, and more. It enables the automation of order management and revenue recognition processes, provides visibility into sales performance, allows configuration of role-based access permissions, and offers additional features.
The platform has a centralized repository where it stores contacts. It also integrates with Microsoft Outlook. In addition, it provides support through live chat, documentation, phone, video tutorials, a forum, and other modes.
According to our data, modules with the highest ratings are identified.
- Team Collaboration — 100
- Opportunities/Deals Management — 98
- Quotes, Orders, and Contracts Management — 89
- Dashboards and Reports — 87
- Leads Management — 86
Benefits that are at the highest level
- Improve Territory Management: Set up a territory hierarchy with multiple levels to check a visual representation of parent-child relationships, create rule-based territories, and assign accounts to those. You can either assign multiple sales reps to a territory or several territories to a salesperson.
- Integrate With SMS Systems: Get insights into text message performance and recognize templates with higher customer responses. You can reach prospects and customers through personalized SMS using CRM data and text message templates to reuse.
- Manage Documents Efficiently: Store attachments and documents in a centralized repository to ensure role-based access. You can share files with internal and external users by generating an encrypted link and sending it through email or chat. It’s also possible to attach files to various CRM records like leads, accounts, contacts, deals, and products.
- Enhance Lead Management: Manage leads at every stage by gathering insights on sales activities, identifying promising leads through prediction scores, and recognizing leads stuck in the pipeline. Assign leads to sales reps automatically by defining rules. You can capture leads from various sources and add them to a single database.
- Easily Handle Contracts: The solution allows you to create contracts manually or use templates by auto-populating necessary fields. Manage contracts, associated specifications, and additional agreements. You can attach electronic versions and photocopies of contracts and keep track of contract details and amendments history.
Principal characteristics
- Appointment Scheduling: You can use the calendar to see your customer’s schedules and colleagues’ appointments. Define visiting hours for an account and request clients to select a time and date within those hours.
- Charts and Visualizations: Use interactive charts and dashboards to visualize large quantities of data. The system offers multiple options like bar graphs, tables, columns, pie charts, and heat maps.
- Lead Scoring: SAP Sales Cloud has multiple lead scoring tools like survey scores and engagement scores that help better understand leads. You can use the deal finder to rank incoming leads based on their likeliness to convert and engage with leads in that order.
- Opportunity Management: Use standard statuses or create custom statuses to identify where opportunities are in the pipeline. The system has sales cycles and phases where you need to perform specific activities between an opportunity’s start and close dates.
- Quote Generation: You can generate quotes by including information about customers and products from an opportunity. Create follow-up activities like emails, calls, and appointments directly from the sales quote.
Restrictions
- It lacks basic integrations such as campaign tools, LinkedIn, Outlook, and more.
- The support team isn’t very responsive.
- The mobile app doesn’t have a user-friendly interface.
Our data indicates that features are not fully supported.
- AI-Based Sales Recommendation — Not Supported
- Group Appointment Scheduling — Not Supported
- Custom Portals — Not Supported
- Contacts Recommendation — Not Supported
- AI-Based Coaching Actions — Not Supported
Primary Benefits
CRM sales software offers a variety of advantages that can enhance your sales cycles.
- Safe Storage: Sales reps can store information about opportunities, activities, contacts, and scheduled plans securely in a central database and access it whenever they need.
- Improved Targeting: A CRM for sales helps segment data and identify valuable opportunities so that the top leads are easy to target without wasting time on those less likely to convert.
- Quick Reports: The sales team can prepare weekly and monthly reports following transparent and automated processes in a short time span.
- Optimized Planning: CRM sales software helps prioritize tasks and optimize daily schedules, ensuring the sales team can contact prospects in a timely, effective way.
- Saved Time and Money: Automated business procedures save time, budget, and resources. It allows sales agents to focus on more complex, core tasks as they won’t be juggling back and forth between multiple processes.
- Thorough Data Analysis: Without dedicated sales CRM software, it might be very difficult to analyze performance issues – think of all the manual and repetitive efforts with Excel sheets! A smart CRM for sales analyzes data thoroughly, offers real-time insights based on customer behavior, identifies bottlenecks, and tells you how the sales department is performing.
- Shorter Sales Cycles: With automated admin processes and accurate data, your sales reps can have more time to connect with leads and nurture prospects. They can establish strong relationships in less time and move leads through pipeline stages quickly.
- Accurate Data: Replace those manual and error-prone processes with efficient automated processes and improve data accuracy. Get better data visibility by filtering the feed with a chosen user type or activity. On top of that, if you’re using a platform equipped with data enrichment tools, it provides automatically populated data about leads, reducing research time and the potential for errors.
- Centralized Operations: Right from handling cold calls and pipelines to managing field sales and prospects, a sales rep’s day is hectic enough. Sales CRM software acts as a perfect centralized system to manage daily operations seamlessly. Integration with the existing channels and communication tools makes it easier to manage accounts.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best CRM for Sales?
There are various CRM software options available that are suitable for sales teams. Notable CRM software for sales teams include Salesflare, Salesforce, HubSpot CRM, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Pipedrive. Each of these CRM options provides features and capabilities specifically designed to improve customer relationship management and enhance sales processes.
What is the top-ranked CRM software?
Salesforce is known as the leading CRM software available in the market. Salesflare, which was established in 2014, is utilized by numerous small and medium-sized businesses that engage in business-to-business selling, including agencies, consultancies, development houses, and tech companies. It has achieved high rankings on various review platforms and is also recognized as the top CRM software on Product Hunt, a prominent community for product enthusiasts.
Which types of CRM are there?
CRM can be categorized into three types: Operational CRM, Analytical CRM, and Collaborative CRM.
Operational CRM is centered around enhancing and automating various business processes, including sales automation, marketing automation, and customer service.
Analytical CRM aims to gain insights and make data-driven decisions by analyzing customer data.
The main focus of Collaborative CRM is to improve customer interactions and relationships by promoting communication and collaboration among various departments and teams.
Is it accurate to refer to Salesforce as a CRM?
Salesforce is a widely recognized CRM software that is popularly used worldwide. It provides businesses with numerous features and functionalities, enabling them to effectively handle customer interactions, sales operations, marketing initiatives, and customer service tasks.
