Overview of product

Salesforce – by far the most popular and widely used CRM – brings together information on all lead and customer touch points, helping you gain an in-depth understanding of every customer. The software also includes in-depth analytic and reporting functions.

Salesforce products are broken down into the CRM, customer service, marketing, community, eCommerce and analytics cloud apps (among others), offering a 360o view of the sales and marketing process. The CRM is great for keeping on top of your customer information, spotting sales opportunities, getting more leads and tracking deals. They’ve recently updated their app and user interface to make them more user friendly. Salesforce integrates with HubSpot’s marketing functions and Marketo, amongst other marketing platforms. Usage limits on their features and forced updates are the only drawbacks.

Overview of product

Sugar’s simple UI makes this CRM extremely easy to learn and use, and everything you need appears on the home page. The reporting features and overall functionality are advanced considering its price point, and it offers a robust search function. The platform includes apps such as calendar, tasks, notes and meetings, so you don’t need to incorporate those features from external programs. Sugar’s features also help improve team selling and communication, and when it comes to tracking leads in the sales cycle, it’s excellent. What’s more, you can distinguish leads from opportunities, and assign probabilities to each.

Not so intuitive is the fact that leads remain in the system even after they’ve converted, and all conversions must be done individually. Its overall performance and automatic updates can be slow. While the software is highly customisable, it’s not quite an out-the-box CRM and will require a bit of work to set up for your specific needs.

Overview of product

Sage’s CRM is a brilliant value-for-money platform that allows for the easy automation of workflows across sales, marketing and support. The UI is intuitive and, when used alongside Sage ERP, allows for advanced functionality. Sage offers an out-the-box CRM that delivers value quickly.

The CRM has a good alignment with social and tells you which leads to work on and when, which is great if your sales teams need a productivity boost. You can also track the performance of sales activities with its Sales KPIs. The CRM is great for marketers, as you can manage campaigns across multiple channels. You can also integrate MailChimp with the CRM, making it easy to send out drip campaigns and track click and open rates.

Overview of product

Oracle Siebel is a comprehensive CRM that covers every aspect of the sales and marketing process and customer lifecycle. You can access business intelligence based on role and with solutions tailored to 20 industries. The CRM apps are broken down into sales, marketing, service, commerce, social and CRM technology. In the marketing app, you can track and manage email and web marketing, events, campaigns, resources, and access analytics.

Oracle’s sales platform is equally thorough, as it lets you manage partners and channels, access analytics and the CRM on the go with its mobile sales platform, which can be accessed online and offline. With the customer order management tool in the commerce function, you can track thousands of product orders and identify up-selling opportunities.

Oracle Siebel supports the deployment, automation and best practice (to name a few) of all of its other CRM apps, which can’t be said for most other CRM options on the market. With such an extensive number of functions in this CRM, this is definitely needed. But with such an array of functions comes a complex pricing structure, and using the entire suite of tools is extremely costly. The UI isn’t as attractive as other CRMs either, and with so many different functions, the platform can be tricky to use.