Salesforce, Pipeline Deals or Zendesk Sell CRM

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 2014. I was recent­ly asked if I had writ­ten an arti­cle com­par­ing Sales­force to Base CRM. The con­trac­tor had also tried Pipeline Deals as a CRM. This got me think­ing that I need­ed to write a blog about the CRMs I per­son­al­ly use the most and the dif­fer­ences between the three. I hope you will find this post help­ful if you are in search for a CRM. Warn­ing: If you are cur­rent­ly using a CRM effec­tive­ly, do not be quick to jump ship and try anoth­er CRM. Before switch­ing, make sure you know the miss­ing link in your cus­tomer reten­tion, what it will take to fix it, and if switch­ing CRMs will be the solu­tion. Many times, switch­ing appli­ca­tions just make for more chaos. In today’s post, I’m not going to tell you which CRM is best for you. They all have their place. I will just share a few high­lights and do my best to com­pare how they are dif­fer­ent.

Sales­force

Sales­force has been the lead­ing CRM on the mar­ket ever since I can remem­ber. Before Sales­force, ACT! was the pre­mi­um soft­ware used by most small busi­ness­es. Sales­force came out of nowhere and pro­duced one of the first and best cloud CRMs. Sales­force grew rapid­ly in the cloud com­put­ing world and com­pa­nies from small, medi­um and even some larg­er enter­pris­es began to switch to Sales­force. In a nut­shell, Sales­force can pret­ty much do what­ev­er it is you want to do when it comes to lead gen­er­a­tion, inter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tions, excep­tion­al report­ing, sales automa­tion, light project man­age­ment. What Sales­force can­not do out of the box, one of their many APIs or plu­g­ins can typ­i­cal­ly do the trick. They have allowed for devel­op­ers to build Apps to work nice­ly with their prod­uct. Yet using more fea­tures with­in Sales­force tends to get a bit expen­sive. On aver­age, a busi­ness would need to spend around $125 a user/​per month for the enter­prise ver­sion. Some­times you can nego­ti­ate this price down a bit with Sales­force. If you want to have a lot of flex­i­bil­i­ty with your CRM, the Enter­prise ver­sion is most like­ly where you will be. As you can see, this can add up and get expen­sive for the small busi­ness con­trac­tors with 5+ employ­ees. The one draw­back with Sales­force is that it can be com­pli­cat­ed. Most of the clients I know who use Sales­force don’t real­ly uti­lize the pro­gram to its full poten­tial. I had one client fly their oper­a­tions man­ag­er to the Bay Area for a sev­er­al day course on advanced fea­tures with­in Sales­force. That was a cou­ple of years ago and to this day, they are still hav­ing prob­lems with Sales­force. This is not Sales­force’s fault! Will they switch? No! They have too much invest­ed in Sales­force. It works fan­tas­tic for their call cen­ter and sales team. Yet, it comes with a steep price tag too!

Who Should Be Using Salesforce

If you want the best with all the bells and whis­tles and cus­tomiza­tion, Sales­force will do the trick. If you have an inside sales team mak­ing cold calls, need­ing some good sales automa­tion (task, reminders, fol­low ups, emails) this is a great prod­uct. If it’s just you, one oth­er sales guy, and you are very ana­lyt­i­cal and detail-ori­ent­ed, you’ll be hap­py with Sales­force.

Base CRM

Base CRM just moved their offices to the Bay Area from Chica­go. One of the rea­sons they did this was to have even more access to the tech com­mu­ni­ty: design­ers, pro­gram­mers, engi­neers etc. They have pro­duced one of the best scaleable CRMs I’ve seen. What I mean is that a small, one man shop can use BASE CRM and a com­pa­ny of 50+ employ­ees can as well. It is capa­ble of just the ​“Facts Jack” fea­tures up to a num­ber of advanced fea­tures such as call record­ing, sales automa­tion, sales, scripts, geo-map loca­tion and more. Although this can change from year to year, Base still has per­haps the slick­est and most advanced Mobile CRM on the mar­ket. It works incred­i­bly well on the iOS devices and even bet­ter on Google’s Android plat­form. When Apple released iOS 8 this fall, my guess is that Base will run even bet­ter! A cou­ple of draw­backs on Base as of July 2014: Export­ing data is a pain in the neck. The only way to do this is to export all your data into CSV files. At that point, you can do what you want with it. I get the rea­son why Base makes it painful. I think they want you to use their reports and not have to do a lot of your own ana­lyz­ing and report­ing out­side of Base. That brings me to the oth­er draw­back: their reports are good, not great. For most com­pa­nies, you’ll prob­a­bly be quite pleased with the slick, easy to read reports. It shows most of you what you want to know; but if you want to dig real deep into your orga­ni­za­tion, Base CRM’s reports have room for improve­ment. They are work­ing on this, and I’m sure in a year or so, I’ll have to update this post. Base also does not have as many plu­g­ins and fea­tures like Sales­force. It has some basic ones such as Google, MailChimp, Xero to name a few. Yet it is miss­ing some key plu­g­ins to small busi­ness tools such as Quick­books. Final­ly, it does­n’t do a great job of inter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tions like Pipeline and Sales­force. You have to rely more on email to com­mu­ni­cate with inside/​outside sales teams. It would be nice to be able to leave com­ments and send noti­fi­ca­tions to oth­er users with­in the Base. Base CRM and most CRMs lack the cus­tomer fol­low up process too. Most CRMs deal with the pre and dur­ing sales process. Once the sale is com­plete, there isn’t a great way to man­age a project, con­nect to a good project man­age­ment soft­ware or have a sys­tem to stay in touch with a cus­tomer. Well, there are ways, but it isn’t easy.

Who Should Be Using Base CRM

Because I love mobile tech­nol­o­gy so much, I’ve set­tled on using Base CRM for my com­pa­ny. I love the updates and fea­tures Base brings on a reg­u­lar basis. I like the task and sales automa­tion fea­tures too. It works real­ly well with Google Apps, which I use for my email and cal­en­dar. I’d say if you real­ly like a slick design, easy to use CRM fea­tures, Base CRM is a great CRM. It also has plans to go neck to neck with Sales­force. So I sus­pect the next 12 months, Base CRM will real­ly make some great updates to their prod­uct. Each one I’ve seen the past few years has been fan­tas­tic. An inside sales team that wants to make calls from their com­put­er, have sales scripts and call record­ing will also ben­e­fit from Base CRM. If you are a small ser­vice busi­ness that will be using Google Apps for your busi­ness and want a qual­i­ty CRM, Base will do the trick. It does not have as many bells and whis­tles as Sales­force, but it has the poten­tial to do quite a bit out of the box. The cost is a bit more rea­son­able too. Most small busi­ness­es (con­trac­tors main­ly) can ben­e­fits from spend­ing around $45 a month per user. I know a few that do just fine at their starter pack­age too: $15 a month.

Pipeline Deals

I like to call Pipeline Deals ​“Old Faith­ful.” This does not mean that Pipeline Deals is old and out of date. Not at all. Pipeline Deals has qual­i­ty apps for the Android and iPhone and has some of the best report­ing fea­tures for a sim­ple CRM. It also has great inter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tion fea­tures. So if I get a call from a client, I can type in a note about the call and tap a but­ton to noti­fy some­one in the com­pa­ny about the call I had with that par­tic­u­lar client. Pipeline is just a rock sol­id CRM. They have per­haps the best cus­tomer support/​service I’ve ever expe­ri­enced too. You can call, chat, or email them just about any­time and get a live per­son in sec­onds! They are more than will­ing to help small to medi­um size busi­ness­es set­up their CRM as well. Pipeline basi­cal­ly is a sim­ple CRM for those who just want the basics: enter and keep track of cus­tomers and sales. The com­pa­ny does make updates to their prod­uct a few times a year, and the updates are very well thought out and bug free. A few draw­backs to Pipeline Deals would be the fact that it real­ly is a sim­ple CRM. It does not come close to what Sales­force can do, and I don’t think Pipeline Deals thinks of Sales­force as a com­peti­tor. Although Pipeline works with Google Apps, it is not with­out a few issues. I think it is a bit clunky and don’t both­er with the inte­gra­tion. Their sales automa­tion is also a bit dat­ed and not as auto­mat­ed and wor­ry-free as Sales­force or Base. For exam­ple, set­ting up fol­low up task in Pipeline can be done, but get­ting remind­ed about them is a bit of a chore. Final­ly their mobile apps are pret­ty basic. If you want a robust mobile solu­tion, Pipeline has a bit more work to do here.

Who Should Use Pipeline Deals

I have an account with Pipeline Deals and do keep up on all their updates. I also know that many of my paint­ing clients use and like Pipeline Deals. These guys don’t need a com­pli­cat­ed CRM. It’s very easy to learn how to use Pipeline Deals and the cost is rea­son­able at $24 per user/​month. For that rate, it’s easy to have a large staff use the basic or advanced fea­tures of this CRM. I trust you have found this post help­ful. If I did not address your ques­tions, com­ment below or send me an mes­sage.