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Register NowCustomers are the lifeblood of any business. Finding new customers is key to growth, but so is keeping the ones you already have and building strong relationships with them. The right technology can help.
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a technology for managing all your company’s relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers. Businesses use CRM to stay connected to customers, streamline processes, and improve profitability. As compared to logging everything on sticky notes and in spreadsheets — it’s okay, you’d be surprised how many companies start out this way! — CRM can make the business of running your business easier and more effective.
Our What is CRM? explainer offers a deep dive into the benefits, features, and different ways to transform your business with a CRM system. That said, not all CRMs are built the same. Even if you’re already familiar with the basics of how the technology works, it’s important to conduct a CRM comparison to see which tool will work best for your small business.
Learn everything you need to know about finding, winning, and keeping customers with The Beginner's Guide to CRM.
Before starting in on a CRM software comparison, you need a solid understanding of what to look for. A good CRM tool starts with these key features:
CRM’s core purpose is to help you build relationships and get closer to customers. This is especially true as businesses engage with customers today across so many different touchpoints, channels, and internal teams. Don’t settle for a glorified Contacts app. A solid CRM tool goes way beyond just gathering names, phone numbers, and email addresses, with capabilities for attracting new customers, nurturing customer relationships, winning more deals, providing customer support, and building customer loyalty. Look for a CRM that helps all of your teams — marketing, sales, commerce, service and IT — work together to create the experiences your customers expect.
A CRM with robust email capabilities can do everything from capture important business activity from your Inbox to let you write and schedule work emails ahead of time. CRM can help automate marketing workflows, such as triggering a marketing email to be sent to a new prospect if they complete an action. It can support sales automation and productivity, ensuring your sales team never forgets to follow-up with a new lead and freeing up their time to focus more on selling and less on admin. It can even support automation for customer service teams such as intelligently assigning a new support case to the agent best able to address the issue, or powering chat bots or other Self-Service support functions.
Setting your team up to work from anywhere has never been more important. Make sure any CRM you’re considering is supported by a full-featured mobile app. A good CRM solution will offer both Android- and iOS-compatible mobile apps.
Reports are a key feature for a CRM tool, and an area in which too many solutions fall short. Look for a CRM with robust reporting capabilities that offer both at-a-glance views into the health of your business and customisation options that let you pinpoint the metrics that are most relevant to your business needs.
A huge benefit of running your business through a CRM tool is keeping an ongoing record, or “single source of truth,” of all your key business interactions, customer data, and files. Make sure your CRM makes it easy for your teams to find what they need, when they need it. This isn’t just a benefit for the business, but actually improves the quality of customer experiences. Think about how many times you’ve called customer service only to repeat your information again and again — with a single source of truth, every team is working from the same customer record.
Beyond a feature set that looks good in a CRM comparison chart, you also want a system that can scale as your business grows. More robust CRM tools often have greater customisation options, and integrations with more third-party tools than their small business counterparts. A small business CRM built on the same platform as its enterprise-sized sibling may offer some of these features, along with a clear upgrade path as you scale your operations. You may not want or need enterprise CRM right now, but make sure you don’t box yourself in with a contact management system or sales tool that can’t scale with your business.
Salesforce CRM, known as Einstein 1, is offered in different versions and configurations to suit businesses of every size and in every industry. Einstein 1 is the breadth of Salesforce CRM technology — one integrated CRM system that can be used by all of your teams to manage and grow customer relationships. All versions are built on the same cloud platform, making it easy to upgrade as your operational needs change. The main differences between versions have to do with the maximum number of users you want to support, and what automations and advanced customisation and integration options are needed.
Salesforce Starter is easy to get started with, and combines essential sales and service features without advanced features new CRM users don’t need. But not all SMBs are built the same. Our other tiers offer progressively more support for larger teams, more complex workflows, process automations, and whatever other needs an individual business might have. You can see details and pricing for all of our editions here.
The main difference between “small” (Starter) and “large” (Professional, Enterprise, and Unlimited) editions is that CRM software for small businesses comes without some of the bells and whistles found in the big business versions.
Salesforce’s “bigger” CRM tiers offer more advanced customisation and automation tools. Larger organisations will usually employ programmers and consultants to tweak to their installs to fit the specialised needs of different departments within a large organisation. They also feature more high-level reporting and analysis tools targeted at upper management users. Small businesses simply don’t require all these features—or the additional price tag— to get business done.
Small business CRM tools like Salesforce Starter offer plenty of customisation options, including integration with common third-party business applications. Many customisations in Starter are available through clicks, not code, making it easy to adapt the system to the way a fast growing company does business. In addition to no-code customisations, look for a CRM with thorough, easy-to-follow resources to help you get more out of your system.
For instance, all Salesforce CRM customers get access to Trailhead, Salesforce’s free, on-demand learning platform that covers everything from Small Business CRM basics to advanced topics for Salesforce administrators and developers.
Businesses of all sizes should also look into:
Comparing Salesforce Einstein 1 with other CRM software is an important part of determining the right solution for your business. Looking at Salesforce’s relative strengths versus the competition is a straightforward way to frame the comparison.
Another helpful exercise as you compare CRM solutions is to review objections that new customers commonly raise as they consider adopting Salesforce. Here are some of the most common, followed by our responses to each:
Read Forrester's survey of 700+ business leaders to see how they're using AI to serve customers better.
Your strategy for choosing a CRM should be two-fold. Conducting a CRM comparison is a good way to get familiar with the benefits and features of Salesforce’s tools and those of Salesforce competitors. But you also need to take a good look at how your organisation does business, and how a CRM system will support and enhance your workflow. Small businesses, in particular, should keep these factors in mind:
Every small business has different needs, so take a look at how to find the best CRM for you.
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