5 Best CRM Software for 2021

Managing relationships with customers is considered as one of the important areas that directly affect your company’s success. Since the functions that are done by a CRM is pretty complex, choosing the right CRM for your enterprise can be a complex task. To make your search easy, we have drilled down some of the top 5 CRM software that is highly popular among businesses globally. Along with that, we will also list down its pros and cons so that you will get a clear understanding of what you should choose for your business.

#1 Salesforce

Salesforce has been around 20 years and is one of the first native CRM solution providers out there. Salesforce is also one of the world’s most popular cloud based CRM platforms. One of the cool things that most users love about Salesforce CRM is the ability to integrate multiple areas of your business such as sales, marketing, commerce, finance, and development into one centralized place. Moreover, Salesforce also gives you access to a wide array of AI tools that allows you to automate your sales, customer service, and marketing efforts, analyze & generate insights.

When compared to other platforms, Salesforce categorizes its CRM offerings into multiple modules or ‘clouds’ which includes Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud. These modules are built to specifically target core areas of your business such as marketing, customer service, and sales. Additionally, Salesforce also delivers additional modules that target other needs that are specific to your business. Sales Cloud is powered by the AI tool of salesforce known as ‘Einstein’. However, you need to have a robust internal IT capability or hire salesforce developers to build and manage your software for the long term. Many companies that lack a robust in-house IT team also rely on offshore software development company for hiring talented developers into their in-house team.

Pros:

• Availability of multiple functionalities that allows easy customization
• Support the development of AI based apps
• Only needs minimal technical skills
• Availability of resources
• Predictive analytics

Cons:

• Lack of 24×7 customer support

#2 NetSuites CRM+

NetSuite’s CRM+ is an end to end CRM solution from Oracle that allows you to integrate all of your customer-focused activities that are related to sales, marketing, customer service, e-commerce, accounting, shipping, and warehousing. To make your product experience more seamless, NetSuite splits their platform into four modules such as Sales Force Automation (SFA), customer service & support, e-commerce & flexible customization, and marketing automation. Oracle made this product as a part of their overall customer experience capability. Like SAP (CRM), Oracle CRM can also handle territories, commissions, sales plans, forecasts, and other functions that are closely related to sales.

Pros:

• Netsuite CRM+ gives you access to a 360-degree overview of your customer’s portfolio. This helps to improve the overall productivity of your team.
• Ability to analyze activities in your sales pipeline and generate intelligent insights based on the activity of your prospects.

Cons:

• Limited ability to integrate with productivity tools
• Lack of utilization of AI based personal assistants
• Access fees are on the higher side when compared to other vendors

#3 Zoho CRM

Zoho is a widely used CRM among small to medium sized businesses. It has a lot of unique capabilities that are very specialized when compared with other vendors. On top of regular functionality that usually comes with any kind of CRM products like pipeline management and lead scoring, Zoho is also capable of doing pretty cool things with AI and predictive analytics. For example, the predictive sales capability offered by Zoho analyzes the behaviors and activities in your sales pipeline to identify where the priorities should be and what the highest priority leads. Also, it has some neatly integrated capabilities that allow easy integration with your social media platforms. Apart from social media integration, Zoho supports seamless integration with a variety of other third party tools and applications.

Pros:

• Tons of functionalities are available for customization & configuration
• As it is extremely easy to use this platform, it’s easy to find resources who know can manage this software
• Predictive analytics that is powered by AI
• Zoho allows 15 days free trial without giving your card information

Cons:

• Not suitable for enterprise grade businesses
• Can feel a bit complex for new users
• Customer Service is not that efficient

#4 Hubspot CRM

Hubspot is a company that is better known for its marketing automation capabilities but it also has CRM capabilities that allow you to track your sales pipeline or your opportunities. In addition to being free, another cool benefit of Hubspot CRM is that it fits well with small companies.

Pros:

• Completely free to use.
• Supports marketing automation

Cons:

• Hubspot CRM can be pretty limiting If you are a complex organization with a large sales team.
• Creating workflows can be a bit confusing
• There is a lack of BI analytic tools

#5 Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Although an ERP provider, the CRM capability of Microsoft Dynamics is pretty strong. The capabilities that this platform delivers to its users range from pipeline management to complex AI based sales forecasting. As Microsoft currently owns Linkedin, you can seamlessly integrate Linkedin with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. This can be highly beneficial If you are running a B2B organization that sells complex products or services to businesses with multiple decision makers. Linkedin integration can be a great way to capture information about your prospects to stay connected and engage with them via social media and track all that in your back office CRM system.

Pros:

• Availability of third party ecosystem that has third party applications
• It integrates well with Office 365, SharePoint, and other Microsoft products. This can be a great fit if most of the software that you use in your company is based on Microsoft.
• Easy integration with Microsoft products

Cons:

• due to its vast customization ability, you will often find it difficult to manage permissions & users
• There is a higher chance of encountering performance issues.