I really like Pipedrive for its simplicity and intuitiveness. Haven't used Hubspot before.

Awesome, thanks for the recommendation. I’m also in the market for a CRM as I start a search fund. I just checked out Pipedrive per the recommendation above. It indeed looks awesome and more geared towards SMBs, but the lowest package is $12/month. I'm primarily looking for a free CRM given my scale, so went with HubSpot after a recommendation from a friend. HubSpot can be expensive once your contact lists get large, but I'm taking a gamble that mine will stay relatively small. I've also heard that Zoho is free, but is far more limiting than HubSpot.

Has anyone much experience with the Salesforce CRM suite? We're weighing the pros and cons against other systems mentioned here so would be keen to get more opinions. Thanks!

Depends on what you're using for your email marketing service, Hubspot has an integration which is quite expensive but could be worth it if you're dealing with big volume.

Just responded to another post re: a survey of CRM's. Check out post by Joe Steigman a few weeks ago. We did a long analysis a while back, and eventually chose Zoho. I can also say that given our detailed use of the CRM, process control, automation, and continued product improvement, upgrade, and support, not to mention very reasonable price point for whole company, i'm glad we chose Zoho. I now understand why 40 million people use it. Salesforce was too expensive, and not, imho, as intuitive.

We're actually in the process of researching CRM's right now. Salesforce didn't seem to justify the high price tag for what we were using it for.

What are you all using for email marketing, and why isn't copper commonly mentioned in these discussions?

In addition to the wonderful guidance here, please see^[redacted]‌'s survey: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/searcher-crm-survey-results-joe-steigman/ along with prior discussions: https://www.searchfunder.com/post/what-crm-systems-would-you-suggest-using-for-your-search-fund

Hubspot will give you a more comprehensive set of tools to fill more of your sales and marketing stack without having to glue things together, but Zoho is a great contender these days. It does quite a lot and more than most small businesses would ever need at a great price.

We're using Deal Relations and are very happy with it.

I am a big fan of Airtable

Hey Sebastien - I'd recommend taking a step back and thinking about what you want the CRM for. I've used a few in various companies for various reasons (Oracle, SFDC, and Hubspot.) and they each have +/- to their platform/applications.


1st I would consider the number of customers you would be putting into this and their sales cycle..

2nd I would consider if you want the CRM as a tool to focus on your own salesforce or as a tool to engage customers. In short - are you using the CRM to "work on the business" or "work in the business."

Last - think about the scale you have as an organization, some CRMs (SFDC as an example) can be virtually anything you want but to some degree require an in-house manager of sorts (not necessarily a great choice for a 50 person company).

Consider your CRM workflow that you would typically have in your company, sales cycle, and reach out to a few CRMs to have them demonstrate to you how their platform would work with your needs. This last bit is important to me because you should ultimately be finding the CRM for your situation, not the other way around.


hope that helps - just my two cents

Hubspot has proven to be the most flexible tool for us

Thank you very much all. Very helpful.

I've used Salesforce, Zoho, Pipedrive and Netsuite. The decision for which to go with depends on the needs and the budget. For those that want it to just work out-of-the-box, don't need customizations, and want to keep it simple, I'd recommend Pipedrive. For those who are on a budget, I'd recommend Zoho, though it can go toe-to-toe with Salesforce if upgrading the license (and cost).

Pipedrive, Insightly, and Affinity I've tried

I'm a proponent of open source software. EspoCRM is a simple to use CRM that gets the job done.

I'm a Salesforce consultant so I know Salesforce very well and wouldn't recommend it for small organisations. I in a startup I recently launched, we use Hubspot and are very happy with it. Nice tracking of website signups/visits to your contacts in your crm.

Can't speak to PipeDrive.

If you are planning to do a lot of business development on LinkedIn, and you want to copy your LinkedIn contacts over to your CRM, I built a tool for that: leadexporter.io. It's currently only supporting Salesforce but I'm planning to make it available for Hubspot as well in the upcoming weeks.

I use Pipedrive and really like it; however, I will probably move over to SFDC because of the integration capability. I use a number of data providers / email tools and the SFDC integrations and then automaton just save me massive amounts of time. It also keeps what is otherwise static data entirely updated.

SEBASTIEN,

CRM is topic I find interesting. My business is built on a particular CRM so I have a bias, but will keep this general.
The business known objectives should be laid out...i.e. how do we want to get leads? Simple enough right? In person, inside sales team, pay for ads, affiliate relationships, etc.
The business should then see what is possible that they do not know about...i.e. how a scanned business card can turn into 4-9 automated email campaign with videos and white papers and further opts in or how the European laws on email rules apply to people living in US who are from Europe...so spam is a real deal issue.

The CRM must be suitable for the business operations and lead gen activities. The CRM should fit the business not the Business fit the CRM.

Size of operations of people and eCommerce and text capacity are things to consider. If you now know you need to talk to someone further...I'm happy to talk if you wish. if this helped you decide...then that's great too.
Dan

Hey SebastiEn -- Pipedrive and Hubspot are good options as they both be customized as per your preferences. Other alternatives which can be considered are Zoho and Base. If you looking specifically for a deal management software check out Dynamo, though it's a little expensive as they are meant for larger deal teams.