Base CRM Offering More Features and Paid Plans (Now Zendesk Sell)

Update: Novem­ber 2018: Base has joined with Zen­desk Sup­port. Their new name is Zen­desk Sell. Their pric­ing struc­ture has changed as well. It spans from $19, $49, $99 and $199 per user. I use the words Base CRM in the arti­cle below, writ­ten in 2012. Base CRM (affil­i­ate link) is still one of my favorite small busi­ness CRMs on the mar­ket. The fea­tures, user inter­face and design are high qual­i­ty and sim­ple to oper­ate. Base CRM is a light­weight Cus­tomer Rela­tion­ship Man­age­ment pro­gram host­ed in the ​“cloud.” It does what most small busi­ness sales peo­ple need it to do. The main rea­son I like Base CRM is its inte­gra­tion with mobile devices and Google Apps for Busi­ness. If you have an Android or iPhone, Base CRM has native appli­ca­tions built for each plat­form. A sales­per­son can tru­ly be on the go enter­ing sales infor­ma­tion and/​or look­ing up con­tact infor­ma­tion from anywhere. Paid Ver­sion Base has always had a paid ver­sion but the plan was recent­ly updat­ed with some added fea­tures. They intro­duced sales fore­cast­ing and a new automa­tion fea­ture which is real­ly slick. I’ve not played around too much with the fore­cast­ing, but from what I’ve seen so far, it looks pow­er­ful. The automa­tion allows a sales staff to have a com­plete sales and fol­low up process: pre and post sale. I can cre­ate as many action items as I’d like in the deals sec­tion now. So for exam­ple, if after the deal is ​“WON” it will auto pop­u­late a set of task to the right per­son or per­sons at my com­pa­ny. This allows me to make sure I nev­er for­get and fol­low a com­plete sales/​service sys­tem. The ful­ly fea­tured (paid) ver­sion went up a bit in price. It is now $45 a month per user to receive the automa­tion and sales fore­cast­ing fea­tures. The cost is a lit­tle steep for some small busi­ness­es I work with only because most con­trac­tors only have a cou­ple of sales peo­ple. The rest only need to use Base CRM as a con­tact man­ag­er. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, at this time, Base CRM can­not pro­vide dif­fer­ent pric­ing struc­tures depend­ing on how peo­ple use the CRM. So you can­not have one per­son using the Free Ver­sion and only the sales peo­ple using the Paid Ver­sion. When you upgrade to the full ver­sion, you pay the same price per user. I believe it is a smart deci­sion for any sales orga­ni­za­tion to have a good sales track­ing CRM, and Base CRM does the job well, even for $45 a month per user. If you are wor­ried about the cost for your non sales staff, one way around this is to just make sure all your con­tacts are in your Out­look or Google Con­tacts and just have your sales staff use Base CRM. The rest can use their Google/​Outlook con­tacts. To learn more about Base CRM and what it can do, check out the pow­er­point slides they sent me. Also, stay tuned soon! Base CRM will be releas­ing a native iPad App this sum­mer. Base-crm-intro­duc­tion-keynote