John Russell, the President of Harley Davidson, once said, “The more you engage with customers the clearer things become and the easier it is to determine what you should be doing.” But when you have random sheets of paper, Excel spreadsheets, and Rolodexes of customer info to contend with, this wasn’t always a realistic goal for some businesses.
Luckily these days, customer relationship management (CRM) tools have made engagement with and data collection from customers a reality for businesses of all sizes.
This idea behind CRM tools is simple:
Regardless of what sort of business you run, your main goal is to retain current customers, increase sales, and provide outstanding service to anyone you come in contact with. There is no better way to achieve all these things at once than with a CRM.
According to Hubspot’s State of Inbound 2015 report, unsuccessful sales teams are twice as likely to rely on Excel, Outlook, or a physical paper trail to track customers as well as potential lead information. The failure, in this case, isn’t necessarily because of poor salesmanship; rather, the issue lies with the quality of tools used. Without the ability to quickly and accurately track all information, and without a centralized location where the entire team can have access to it, these teams are failing due to insufficient resources.
The name “customer relationship management” says it all: it is a tool by which you—and all members of your team that have access to it—can effectively manage the relationships you have with customers and prospects. CRM tools are not just a place to store your customers’ contact information. They serve a much more comprehensive business purpose than that.
Collection & Centralization
One of the problems with the way customer information was previously aggregated was that it mostly existed in the hands of just one person—in a Rolodex, in a spreadsheet, printed out on sheets of paper and stuffed into a file cabinet, etc. CRM solves this issue by providing centralized storage and global company access to client and account information.
While the account or sales manager may be the main point-of-contact for your customers, your business is ultimately responsible for supporting and growing that relationship. Without access to the details, you cannot accomplish that.
Lead Identification
Access to the full picture of your business is essential if you want to understand what’s making it run and then use that information to grow from. So while on the one hand CRM tools are extremely useful for keeping tabs on current customers, they’re equally as useful for keeping track of potential leads:
The more information you can gather on your audience, the better prepared you’ll be to identify, acquire, and convert more leads.
Lifecycle Tracking
What happens when one of your sales representatives, account managers, or marketing admins goes on vacation, calls out sick, or leaves their position permanently? Without a centralized system for keeping track of their work, their communications, their relationships with customers, there is bound to be part of your company’s historical record that goes missing along with them.
Keeping your customers’ experience top-of-mind, think about how easy it would be to provide coverage for a team member or to bring in a replacement if you had the entire history of an account all in one place. Your customers may need to get used to interacting with a new contact, but all of the previous conversations and transactions wouldn’t need to be repeated, saving you time and saving your customers the frustration and inconvenience of having to repeat themselves.
Sales Organization
Running a business can be difficult enough, but when you have to oversee the activity and manage the goals from a number of different departments, it can become downright tedious. One of the departments that may require extra monitoring is the sales team. With so many people contacting customers and prospects every day and bringing in varying amounts of revenue, it’s especially important to have a way to track their activity as well as to establish goals.
CRM tools can help you keep tabs on all of that at the most granular level—tracked by customer, by sales rep, by transaction, by timeline, by date, and more.
Marketing Integration
The activity from marketing efforts are so closely tied to those of sales that it would seem silly not to have a way to integrate marketing into the same tool. Tools that do offer marketing integration usually do so around the purposes of email marketing campaigns, though there are others that connect social media, website landing pages, and other marketing efforts to the CRM. The main purpose being that it’s more effective to gather all leads and communicate with customers from one source rather than several.
Data Analysis
Perhaps the most important purpose of CRM tools is their ability to help businesses keep track of all data and analyze it more easily, more quickly, and more efficiently than ever before. Big data no longer has to be a big problem for businesses that have a tool that automatically gathers and processes information on their behalf.
You’ll find a variety of functions and features associated with different CRM tools, so make sure to do your research carefully beforehand. When looking into a CRM solution for your business, consider which of the following features are going to be the most important to have access to:
Collection & Centralization
Lead Identification
Lifecycle Tracking
Sales Organization
Marketing Integration
Data Analysis
Once you’ve identified what your business needs in the way of customer relationship (and engagement) management, it’s time to start looking at your options.
CRM tools can come in many forms. For those of you looking at a software solution, it’s important to understand the difference between the two major types you’ll find:
According to research conducted by Capterra, 27% of businesses surveyed currently use on-premise software while 73% use web-based software. There are pros and cons to either option, though the advances in cloud-based solutions (greater security, dedicated support, less reliance on hardware, etc.) are making hosted CRM tools more attractive with each passing year.
Whichever route you choose to go, your main goal needs to be in finding the CRM tool that best fits your needs, includes the features you require, and is within your price range. Some of these tools can become very expensive if not used as intended, so make sure your team is onboard and ready for the transition before making any major investments.
Some of these names you may already recognize (especially if they provide tools that cover other parts of your operations). Take your time in researching all options—software and otherwise—to ensure they fit with your overall business plan as well as with the other tools you use (like WordPress).
Here is our list of the CRM software providers worth looking into in 2016:
Apptivo gives you the opportunity to choose the level of customer relationship management you seek, so if you’re just looking for a tool to manage contacts, if you’re looking for more advanced sales tracking and prognostication, of if you want a more comprehensive system, they’ve got you covered. They also offer mobile integration, website integration, and other customization bonuses.
Interested in Apptivo?
Act!’s CRM promise is pretty straight-forward: If you need a way to better keep track of your contact information and activity, then Act! is the solution for you. This is a much more simplified offering than some of the more popular ones mentioned on this list—and that’s perfectly fine if that’s all you need.
Interested in Act!?
When sales is your main priority, but you want to make sure it’s done right—with authentic interactions and more effective planning—a sales-focused CRM is the way to go. Contactually’s platform helps you narrow your focus for improved engagement and conversion rates.
Interested in Contactually?
Much like other Hubspot solutions, their CRM splits solutions in an intuitive fashion. They have three different sales solution packages based on the level of support and automation you’re looking for in your CRM (the focus here being on simplifying and improving the sales process).
Interested in Hubspot?
If basic contact management and team collaboration/communication is what you’re in search of, then this is a CRM worth testing out. Less Annoying CRM’s goal is to make contact management as well as the management of your sales pipeline much more simplified.
Interested in Less Annoying CRM?
For businesses who are focused on the customer relationship more than on the management of the details surrounding the sale, the Maximizer CRM platform promises just that. With customizable options, businesses of all shapes and sizes can make the CRM work for their business (and industry) to make sure they’re tracking the right information to build the right relationships.
Interested in Maximizer CRM?
Microsoft is already a well-trusted brand, so for those of you who are fans of their product portfolio, this may be a no-brainer. Unlike some CRMs whose big push is “sales,” the Microsoft CRM’s focus is on customer engagement, so their offering is more focused on helping you better engage with customers—through all avenues, including social media and your mobile device—so you can sell easier and provide them with a better experience.
Interested in Microsoft Dynamics?
Oracle is no stranger to creating solutions to help businesses run better, so when they promise to help businesses integrate all customer touch-points into one solution, they mean it. For those of you with an extensive reach of customers and prospects, a more comprehensive solution may be what you’re looking for.
Interested in Oracle?
For smaller businesses who are more analytically inclined, the Pipedrive CRM was made for you. The sales pipeline and the easy interface through which you can view and manage it is going to be the biggest draw for this tool. All other features of this CRM serve to bolster that central hub of the pipeline.
Interested in Pipedrive?
Presspoint CRM is a fully functioning customer relationship management tool that knows how to cater to its audience. This CRM solution is fully integrated with WordPress and offers a ton of features: contact information collection, smart lists, email marketing, opportunity management, ecommerce, custom form builds, and more.
Interested in Presspoint CRM?
A lot of the tools on this list are more well-known providers who can provide comprehensive sales and marketing CRM tools. However, there are others—like Really Simple Systems—who realize that large companies are not the only ones in need and have developed a fairly extensive CRM solution for smaller businesses.
Interested in Really Simple Systems CRM?
Salesforce is perhaps the most well-known and consistently high-ranked of all CRM tools. With a cloud-based platform that covers the breadth of your sales and marketing needs, you can be assured that your organization’s data will be well-organized, easy to manage, and ready for analysis.
Interested in Salesforce?
If you’re unsure about moving all of your sensitive sales information into a cloud-based software, SAP offers both an on-premise and cloud-based CRM solution. SAP’s CRM also focuses on integration so you can manage all aspects of the customer relationship and engagement through a single tool.
Interested in SAP?
If your main focus is on sales—automation, productivity, and results—then the Zoho solution is a good pick. While this CRM does have other integration capabilities, the main focus here is on managing, automating, and improving the sales process.
Interested in Zoho?
As you can see, there are a lot of CRM software providers available, each covering a different set of offerings for different types of businesses. What doesn’t change among them though are the benefits:
While there are many benefits to employing the use of CRM software, there are also some drawbacks worth noting:
While there is a lot to be said for CRM software, it may not be the best solution for your business right now—especially if you’re working with a tight budget. WordPress is equipped to work with a number of other tools already, so let’s explore the possibilities.
The Apptivo CRM Plugin is not meant to serve as a substitute for the full software tool (mentioned above). This plugin, however, aims to help you create contact forms, newsletter signups, and testimonials on your WordPress website that will then link up to your Apptivo CRM.
Interested in Apptivo Business Site CRM?
For those using vCita LiveSite, this is the compatible CRM plugin that will help with capturing leads and managing the customer relationship and data. As vCita is also a payment and portal solution, those capabilities are also included in this plugin.
Interested in CRM & Lead Management for WordPress by vCita?
While not a traditional CRM solution, Leadin does assist with lead generation in a creative way. If you’re looking for a way to find out more about your site’s visitors, Leadin will track their history on your website and upload it to their contact record once they fill out a form so you have a history of what piqued their interest before you ever speak to them.
Interested in Leanin?
If you’re looking for a strictly contact management tool that can be integrated into WordPress, the UkuuPeople plugin does just that. You can manage your contact list, track all interactions, create email lists, and communicate with other team members all from within the plugin.
Interested in Simple WordPress CRM – UkuuPeople?
The UpiCRM plugin’s focus is on lead generation and making the process of collecting your lead information easier. You’ve already set up forms on your website, so why should you have to set them up again for a new tool? UpiCRM will map the form fields you currently have on your site and pull in lead contact information based on that.
Interested in UpiCRM?
The WordPress Leads plugin can work in conjunction with the WordPress Landing Pages or WordPress Calls to Action plugins, or it can work on its own. The purpose of this plugin is to track all of your visitors’ activity before they fill out a form on your website. This way you can learn more about who they are, how they found your website, what they did once they were on your website, and more.
Interested in WordPress Leads?
For those of you who are already using Salesforce and want to reduce the amount of data entry between your WordPress website and your CRM, this plugin will help with that. By creating a connection between the forms on your website and Salesforce, you can automatically capture and filter all lead information into your CRM.
Interested in WordPress-to-lead for Salesforce CRM?
The WordPress CRM plugin was created in order to improve the organization and collection of contact information. If you’ve already got a CRM solution and are just looking for a more organized way of keeping track of all the contact information that comes off your website, this would be a great add-on.
Interested in WP-CRM – Customer Relations Management for WordPress?
While many of these software and plugin tools offer to help businesses with better customer engagement, the Zoho plugin is taking that piece of CRM quite literally with a live chat integration. By having live conversations with your customers and engaging with them in real-time, you can increase your conversions. The plugin also comes with visitor tracking so you’ll collect real-time information on who you’re speaking with while you speak with them.
Interested in Zoho SalesIQ?
Similar to what we saw with the CRM software solutions, CRM WordPress tools serve to improve the customer relationship management process. With most of these tools, however, the benefits aren’t as comprehensive since each plugin serves a smaller piece of the puzzle. When looking at these tools as a whole though, the following benefits are clear:
Many of the cons associated with CRM software do not apply here (which is why you’re probably turning to these in the first place). However, there are a few points worth noting:
Regardless of whether you decide to go the route of a full CRM software, a partial but more focused tool, or one of the many WordPress plugins and integrations, your business is sure to reap the benefits. In the Capterra CRM user research study, they found that various parts of business were positively affected by the use of a software solution:
That said, make sure to do your research before investing in any one tool. The ramp-up time, cost, features, and available support are all important considerations in the decision-making process—especially for a tool that won’t produce much ROI if not used in full and in the way it was intended.
Remember: Information is power. The more you can learn about your audience and your company’s history, the better you’ll be able to serve your customers, reach new ones, and increase the growth of your organization.
