Answer a survey filled with lots of business jargon and they’ll suggest a few products that fit the bill. One tool we came across that might be useful if you’re looking for a CRM but don’t have a preconceived notion of how you need it to work is the SmallbizCRM Finder.
Just look at how workflow can be automated with Zoho CRM, and you’ll see why it has the potential to lighten your workload.
The Professional version runs $20 per month per user, which seems quite reasonable to us, given the amount of time and energy it has the potential to save. Zoho CRM does offer a fairly full-featured free version, but to get the Outlook and Word plugins we want to use, we’ll have to recommend the Professional version. You can learn more about templatizing documents here.Īnd lastly, we needed to consider price. Fortunately, Zoho CRM offers a plugin for Microsoft Word as well-available for Professional level and above. We wanted to be able to create documents in Microsoft Word and use Word’s built-in mail merge functionality to keep documents personalized, but as automated as possible. The next factor that was important to us was document templating. Learn more about Zoho’s email template features here. We were also impressed that you can view analytics data for your various templates to see how well they’re performing. You can sort and search these templates, or even designate some as favorites so that they’re first at hand when you’re working. Fortunately, Zoho offers an array of built-in email templates to choose from, or you can make your own from scratch or modify an existing template. The next critical feature we needed to see in Zoho was email templating. Resolve conflicts while synchronizing contacts, calendar and tasks with Zoho CRM so that there is no duplication of customer dataĭo note that the Outlook plugin is only available for the Professional level of Zoho CRM and above.Export contacts, calendar (events) and tasks from Microsoft Outlook to Zoho CRM.
Zoho offers a plugin for Outlook that synchronizes contacts AND tasks AND events, and it’s available for both Windows and Mac, though the PC version has more features. It was quite similar to HubSpot in all the comparison charts, but we really loved the Outlook templating abilities of HubSpot, so it got pushed aside. Since we had made an assumption that two-way contact syncing was a standard feature and were surprised to find out it wasn’t, we decided to use that as our top search criterion and work from there.Īnd that’s how we found Zoho. In returning to the drawing board, we had already eliminated several candidates because of how much work they wanted you to do in their CRM dashboard. Based on the elegance of this integration, contact syncing seemed like it would be a given.
We were so excited about HubSpot’s Outlook compatibility and its plugin that allows you to pull from a library of built-in email templates and documents, or schedule a series of timed emails inside the familiar Outlook interface. What? No! We need a CRM that syncs contacts both ways.
We were setting up HubSpot on our client’s computer, and during the setup process, we were asked to download her contacts from Outlook as a. We promised to report back with the results, and here we are. A few weeks ago, we wrote about choosing a CRM (Contact Relationship Manager) for a law practice client of ours.