3 of the best – a CRM systems comparison for small businesses

I wanted to look at crm solutions available to small businesses and complete a comparison of each. My first love is Dynamics 365, so I’d like to apologise for the Dynamics centric language I use throughout this blog. I decided to spin up free trials of

• Zoho – (See other reviews)
• SugarCRM
• Salesforce

These products were in the top 10 crm systems for small businesses in 2018. I’ve never seen or used these products so I spent just two (I know I need to get a life) doing the standard things within CRM. This included

• Creating a lead, converting it to an opportunity
• Creating a case

I added activities at each point of the process to see how the solutions compared. After that I decided to do some basic admin tasks:

• Create views/dashboards/reports
• Create a basic workflow
• Change the layout of a current entity
• Create a new entity with additional fields

Here are my findings

Reporting – Creating Views and Dashboards

Zoho – fairly easy  to create a dashboard, wasn’t easy to find where to create custom views of data. However, I soon came across the reporting allowing me to create reports that could be viewed via a dashboard.

Salesforce – Easy drag and drop reporting capability that was easy to complete, also had the facility to add charts etc. These could then be added to a dashboard

SugarCRM – Like my early experience with most of this product the process felt very clunky. Got there in the end but not as slick as the other crm solutions.

Admittedly this wasn’t a scientific experiment but I thought it would be useful to document my experience. At their heart, CRM systems will do the same type of things (Capture leads, manage opportunities and case management). However, from someone just starting out on their CRM adventure its definitely worth getting trials of the systems and speaking to those who’ve already deployed them…….Something that’s common sense but not always common practice.

Click the crm solution below to see other reviews

• Zoho
• SugarCRM
• Salesforce

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