Customer relationship management. CRM. Whether it’s a phenomenon that you’ve recently stumbled upon, or if it’s a well-maintained area with trimmed hedges in your mental real estate portfolio, you probably know that it’s one of the most important tools for a business to incorporate into its toolbox. But what exactly does CRM integration mean for a business? Let’s discuss.
It’s well-known that Bottom Funnel marketing tactics drive the most consistent revenue for businesses. These Bottom Funnel tactics focus on customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. When a business has an online presence, the efficacy of these tactics can be tracked, measured and adapted. CRM tools provide a centralized platform for automating and optimizing these Bottom Funnel activities.
But how, you may ask, does a CRM tool automate these tasks in an effective way? How can a few algorithms lead to greater human customer satisfaction and loyalty? The answer, as you may have guessed, lies in data. CRM data integration is the process of combining all of your data from sources like your CRM tool of choice, your website, social media platforms, or any other third-party applications and transforming it into a unified format that can be read by your CRM tool. This creates a single, readable, 360-degree view of your customers and their behaviors, preferences, and needs. It turns out that a few well-optimized algorithms can easily improve customer relationships.
Now that you’re familiar with the meaning of CRM integration and CRM data integration, it’s important to pick a robust tool that can handle your data needs. Luckily for you, the market is teeming with powerful CRM tools. Below, we’ll begin evaluating the Top 5 CRM tools for your business in 2024.
Salesforce
With more than 150,000 customers, Salesforce is the king of CRM tools. It has everything you need to manage your relationships, from marketing to sales to service, and more. Salesforce also offers industry-specialized solutions for businesses of all types. If you’re operating a healthcare, education, manufacturing or nonprofit business, Salesforce has got your back.
With over 5,000 CRM application integrations, you can rest assured that your Gmail or Shopify data will happily glide into place. Salesforce also offers a variety of tools that excel in CRM data integration. If you’re looking to have full control over your data entry, Salesforce offers tools that allow you to integrate data from multiple sources manually. One of their main sources of appeal, however, is their friendly neighborhood AI, aptly named Einstein. Einstein helps you analyze, visualize, and act on your CRM data. Einstein will also offer to help you automate tasks, generate insights, and make predictions based on the data you have flowing through Salesforce.
Salesforce has everything you need to manage your customer relationships. It offers flexible pricing plans ranging from $25 to $300 per user per month. It works well with other CRM apps. However, it can be pricey and tricky to use, and you might need some technical skills to get the most out of it. So if you’re looking for a simple and cheap CRM tool, you might want to continue your search below.
HubSpot
Hubspot slides into the top 5 at a cool second place. It’s a popular and user-friendly CRM platform offering a free and simple CRM solution that covers all the basics of customer relationship management. We love free things, right? HubSpot’s 121,000 customers definitely seem to. That being said, HubSpot also offers paid and advanced solutions for marketing, sales, service, and other operations, which can be added to the CRM tool as needed.
While HubSpot isn’t on par with Salesforce’s massive amount of CRM software integrations, it offers a healthy 750, meaning most, if not all, of your bases will be covered with HubSpot.
HubSpot performs well in CRM data integrations and offers the same ability to manually integrate data as well as its own AI, named HubSpot AI. These tools operate in much the same way as Salesforce’s tools. Whether or not they lose points for creativity is up to you.
If you’re a small or medium-sized business, HubSpot may well be the choice for you. It’s affordable and flexible, with pricing plans ranging from free to $1,200 per month.
Zoho CRM
Zoho CRM comes in at third place. Zoho CRM is a cloud-based tool that does a lot of things for you. Like other CRM platforms, it helps with sales, marketing, customer support, collaboration and reporting. It integrates with over 800 apps, including, naturally, all of Zoho’s own products, like Zoho Desk, Zoho Campaigns, and Zoho Analytics.
Zoho is easy to use and customize, and offers a friendly interface for newcomers to CRM. It uses AI (notice a trend?) to offer you insights into which leads and opportunities you may want to focus on, how to sell better, and what you should expect based on trend analysis.
However, the pricing plans are slightly more rigid than HubSpot’s. The Essentials plan is $49 per user per month, and offers limited storage space (512 MB per user). The Premiere plan, sitting at $135 per user per month, increases that amount of storage to 20 GB per user. With the pricing plan and limited customization options, we tend to suggest Zoho CRM for smaller teams and companies. All things considered, Zoho CRM definitely deserves a place in the top 5.
Zendesk CRM
Zendesk CRM is in fourth place. Zendesk offers a unique separation of tools that’s useful for the right business. It offers two platforms: Zendesk Suite and Zendesk Sell. Suite is for customer support. It gives you a full view of the customer journey and has chatbots, workflow automations, and tools for email ticketing and building online help centers. Sell is, surprisingly, for the sales side of your business. It offers marketing tools and helps you track all customer conversations and manage deals as they navigate the customer journey.
One of the main appeals of Zendesk CRM is its simplicity. It has an intuitive interface and requires no coding (a big plus for some). It has a rich and open API that allows you to integrate with your own established solutions and build your own apps. In addition to its very own AI-powered automations, you’ll have no more limitations or restrictions with your CRM tool.
The cons boil down to the limited customization options, especially for the Suite platform, which prohibits field or object customization. The pricing plans, depending on whether you opt for Suite or Sell, have an option for smaller teams or larger enterprises, sitting at $49 per user per month or $149 per user per month respectively.
Sugar CRM
Last but not least, Sugar CRM. Sugar is a no-compromise CRM that offers the maximum level of control and customization, with a powerful developer platform and state-of-the-art customization tool. Although it has limited integrations, Sugar means your CRM integration will go smoothly and will transform your data into high-definition customer experiences.
Sugar provides high-level sales intelligence. It allows you to sell more and better, with less effort and guesswork. It offers guided selling, enhanced forecasting, data enrichment, customer journey mapping, and more. The 4K HD view you’ll have of your customers will really allow you to wow them with every interaction.
The downsides are that Sugar’s not a user-friendly platform. It has an outdated interface and a steep learning curve and you’ll probably need training or monk-like levels of patiences to master this tool. In addition to that, the number of integrations offered by Sugar is limited compared to the other contenders on this top 5.
Even though we’re at the bottom of the list, everyone’s a winner today. You’re here, meaning that you’re interested in taking your business to the next level in 2024. We hope we’ve helped you learn how to make the most of your data. And remember, we’re here to help you succeed.
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