Alternative to Salesforce - Meet Zendesk Sell

Updat­ed Nov 2018: Base changed their name to Zen­desk Sell Sales­force con­tin­ues to be a strong leader in Cus­tomer Rela­tion­ship Man­age­ment (CRM) for many medi­um and large com­pa­nies. I still hear a lot of chat­ter from com­pa­nies look­ing to switch for many rea­sons. Some­times it has to do with sav­ing mon­ey or that they just need some­thing that is eas­i­er to use. I have used many CRMs over the years to see how they work and rec­om­mend the ones I feel are the bet­ter choice for my clients and busi­ness­es I meet in per­son or online. I still log in to quite a few plat­forms to run mar­ket­ing and sales reports and keep tabs on how CRM pro­grams look and feel. In this arti­cle, I’ll point those of you inter­est­ed in the one I use and rec­om­mend the most: Zen­desk Sell CRM (refer­ral link).Zen­desk Sell has been around since 2009, and I believe I first start­ed test­ing it around 2010. Zen­desk Sell was an ear­ly adapter to build­ing one of the best mobile apps, start­ing with the iPhone. It was then I became hooked and start­ed using it myself. It also helped to be a con­sul­tant, because Zen­desk Sell made me a refer­ral part­ner. They have kept me up to date on their prod­uct and allowed me to use their prod­uct for my com­pa­ny. I get to test and use Zen­desk Sell with all of its fea­tures, which gives me a strong work­ing knowl­edge of this CRM. I have ties to oth­er CRMs too, not just Zen­desk Sell. For the sake of this arti­cle, I’m giv­ing folks a strong push to switch to Zen­desk if they are look­ing for a Sales­force alter­na­tive.

Built for the Small, Medi­um & Large Companies 

Zen­desk Sell built their prod­uct for all sizes com­pa­nies, though in recent years have tar­get­ed larg­er com­pa­nies to use their prod­uct. Zen­desk Sell Cor­po­rate is mak­ing updates and new fea­tures to go head to head against Sales­force. I work with small to medi­um size busi­ness­es, and I think it works great for any size busi­ness.

Pric­ing

The pric­ing starts at $19 per user. So if you are a start­up com­pa­ny, that would be your month­ly expense to use the desk­top and mobile app. It is a great way to get start­ed using a CRM. As your com­pa­ny and staff grow, you will need more and more fea­tures to help run the sales cycle. Zen­desk Sell pric­ing for more fea­tures is $49 – 99 (Pro­fes­sion­al & Enter­prise) range a month per user. Most of my clients will stay at that lev­el with maybe 2 – 5 users. Final­ly, if your busi­ness needs all the fea­tures and you have many sales reps, you will need their top of the line prod­uct which is $199 a month per user. What they call the Elite ver­sion geared for call cen­ters, door to door sales, soft­ware com­pa­nies, and so forth. If you are a small busi­ness and love ana­lyt­ics and track­ing, then you will also enjoy the ben­e­fits of the Enter­prise ver­sion too. 

Key Fea­tures of Zen­desk Sell CRM

• Inte­grates well with Out­look, G Suites or Exchange (You can send/​receive emails with­in Zen­desk Sell too. All your com­mu­ni­ca­tions with a prospect or cus­tomer are tracked with­in the CRM)
• The mobile app for Android and iPhone are the best in the busi­ness: I just have not seen a bet­ter mobile app on the mar­ket. I could get by run­ning most of my sales with­out a desk­top or lap­top com­put­er. So if I am a mobile sales guy, I have no excuse to plu­g­in my data. Sell makes the entire process a no-brain­er. The mobile fea­ture is per­haps the #1 rea­son I’ve become a big fan of Sell over Salesforce.
• Inte­grates with many oth­er well-known cloud pro­grams and Zapi­er: Some of the inte­gra­tions you’ll find in Zen­desk Sell are Drop­box, Hub­spot, Mailchimp, Xero, Google Dri­ve, Pan­daDocs, Face­book and so forth. You can also use Zapi­er to con­nect many oth­er apps to talk to Sell.
• Easy to Read Sales and Oth­er Help­ful Reports: Review sales, goals, sources, fore­cast sales, com­par­i­son and much more with easy to view and inter­ac­tive reports.

Com­plete CRM: Zen­desk Sell does an excel­lent job from the begin­ning of a con­tact (Lead), through the entire sales process. It is easy to see where you are at, at a giv­en time in the process. The inter­face with­in Zen­desk Sell is so much clear­er and more sim­pli­fied than Sales­force. I always found it was hard­er to run reports and more ​“com­fort­able” to get lost with­in Sales­force. [cap­tion id=“attachment_3795” align=“alignleft” width=“400”] Sam­ple of my auto­mat­ed task[/caption]

• Make, Receive and Record Sales Calls on the Desk­top and Mobile Apps 
• Auto­mate Task, Emails and Sales Process: This is anoth­er one of my favorite tools. The process is easy to set­up and use. There are a few fea­tures that still need some work, but over­all it works well. 
  • Basi­cal­ly, you can cre­ate your ide­al sales process from start to fin­ish. When you move a deal from a dis­cov­ery stage, for exam­ple, you can cre­ate a series of tasks asso­ci­at­ed with that stage. You can also cre­ate email tem­plates for stages of your sales pipeline. Why rein­vent the wheel. If some­thing works, make a sys­tem for it. You can cus­tom the emails to make them more per­son­al too.
• Cre­ate a Prod­uct Pric­ing Cat­a­log for your Sales Staff — sort of a cheat sheet for your team.
• See an Inter­ac­tive Map of your Prospects and Cus­tomers: Anoth­er favorite fea­ture of mine. Inter­ac­tive map­ping works amaz­ing. It is a Google map that is always updat­ed. If your team is on the go a lot, this is a pow­er­ful tool. I am a big fan of sales­peo­ple tak­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty to prospect on their own, giv­ing them no excuse won­der­ing what they can be work­ing on at a giv­en time.
• Let­ting You Know if a Sale is in Dan­ger of Being Lost: You’ll get a noti­fi­ca­tion if you get an email from a prospect that does not sound pos­i­tive. You can then make that a pri­or­i­ty to see if you can find a way to close the deal.

There are many more fea­tures that can I could share. If you have a spe­cif­ic ques­tion, mes­sage me about it. If I do not know, I can get one of the guys at Zen­desk Sell to answer it. I am not a firm believ­er that there is just one CRM that works for every com­pa­ny. There are many fan­tas­tic prod­ucts on the mar­ket. I am just impressed with some of the fea­tures in Sell that I shared above and how easy it is for me to use in my own busi­ness. Zen­desk Sell has a lot more up their sleeve that I did not dis­cuss. If you are a medi­um to large size com­pa­ny, check out their oth­er prod­ucts that can help your com­pa­ny grow and be more profitable.