A stellar CRM can make a world of difference to a product marketer’s day-to-day. It helps tighten alignment with sales teams, keeps customers’ data consolidated, streamlines the sales process and ensures everyone gets a great experience, every time. Different CRMs have different capabilities though, so it’s important to find one that ticks all your boxes - here are eight tried and tested CRM tools from within the community!
After tons more tool recommendations? Then head to our Product Marketing Tools of Choice! It's packed with 200+ tools, 15 segments, and lots endorsements.
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign’s a blend of email marketing, marketing automation and CRM tools. Just some of its features include scheduling emails, creating funnels, integrating trigger emails, splitting audience by segment, automating workflows, notifying, scoring, assigning and prioritising leads, and multi-channel messaging (including on-site, SMS, Facebook and email).
Website: activecampaign.com
Cost: the pricing varies depending on how many contacts you have. To give you an idea, below are the costs for 2,500 contacts.
Salesforce
It’s the world’s #1 CRM for a reason. Salesforce unites all your teams - marketing, sales, service and commerce - and equips them with the tools needed to connect with customers in a meaningful manner. There’s too much to squeeze into a paragraph or two, but some of its highlights include predictive scoring, marketing automation, journey building and goal tracking tools.
Website: salesforce.com
Cost: package prices are the same across both their Sales and Service Cloud and all costs below are based on annual billing.
Salesforce keeps all of our customer and account data. Whether I need to see the latest activity for a specific customer or check on how the mid-market sales team is progressing toward their quarterly goal, Salesforce is an always-open tab."
William Chia, Senior Product Marketing Manager at GitLab
Pipedrive
Pipedrive is an activity-based sales CRM. It visualises the sales process in stages, prompts next steps so you stay on top of your pipeline, lets you send and receive emails in-app, automatically bumps tasks that are due or overdue to the top of your lists, and shifts activities down the line with a simple Kanban-style drag-and-drop board.
Website: pipedrive.com
Cost:
From a tech flexibility standpoint, I really like Pipedrive’s mobile app. You can view tasks within deals in a calendar view (daily summary), so it gives you a list of focused tasks for that particular bucket (company). I’m a big tool junkie using things like Trello for task management, but having all of the context (you can add tasks within email threads or organizations etc) in one place that syncs with your calendar is very helpful.
Farhan Manjiyani, Product Specialist at Qu POS
Copper
A CRM system just for G Suite. Within Copper, you can access all your customer and prospect interactions and deals and create custom pipelines and dashboards. Even better, it automatically captures all your contacts, emails and important account info, leaving one less task on your plate. Team-wide visibility into every interaction also makes it super easy for you to pick up where your colleague left off.
Website: copper.com
Cost:
Intercom
Intercom are the communication giants. Their chatbot and live chat features help qualify more leads, their targeted messages help onboard and activate more customers, and their inbox automation and self-service support ensure personalisation’s on tap at scale.
Website: intercom.com
Cost: all prices are 'from'.
With so many integrations and customization options, Intercom is our go-to customer portal. As a PMM, I use it to keep track of who left what on NPS and review sites. I also use information from customer conversations I've had here to send feature requests to our product team.
Intercom, Lisa Kalner Williams, Product Marketing Director at Agorapulse
Close
Close brings you the best of both worlds: CRM and built-in sales automation. It comes with complete transparency so everyone knows what’s going on in the sales process, built-in calling to maximise reps’ on-the-phone time, automatic follow-up reminders, lots of personalised email templates, one-click SMS contact, easy access to all your leads, automatic sales sequences, and more.
Website: close.io
Cost:
Zoho
From expense reporting, online surveys and integrated marketing automation systems to contact management, online training tools and governance solutions, Zoho’s got just about everything you need to run not only every aspect of product marketing but the business full stop.
Website: zoho.com
Cost: there are waaaay too many prices to give without taking up too many pages of the report, but if you head to the site they’ve got breakdowns per product and package.
SugarCRM
SugarCRM encourages collaboration across marketing, sales and services and, using AI and machine-based learning, enables you to understand prospective customers before you’ve had a chance to say hello. Better yet, it makes data entry nearly non-existent and automatically converts leads based on a prospect’s behaviour.
Website: sugarcrm.com
Cost:
