Hate Salesforce? Here’s the CRMs you should use.

Salesforce is the most well known and successful CRM on the market. It’s so successful that many founders and team leads skip researching CRMs and rush to sign an annual Salesforce contract. 

If you’re reading this, you are likely already aware of how terrible Salesforce is. Whether it’s the overbearing complexity or the limited access to their support team, Salesforce is just an awful experience through and through. To deal with it, most companies end up hiring a team of engineers just to make it usable. This is just the beginning though, the complexity has cascading effects from increased onboarding periods to clunky and inefficient lead tracking. 

If you want to enable your sales team to crush goals, it’s important they’re set up with a sales software that accelerates their performance instead of hindering it. 

To make sure no team makes the mistake of choosing Salesforce as their CRM, I’ll be sharing which CRMs your sales team should use and why. 

1) LeadLoft

LeadLoft was built with the goal of simplifying CRMs from the ground up while striking the perfect balance of simplicity and power.

Just imagine a CRM where you can onboard new reps 2x faster, generate 5x more revenue per rep. Well, that’s exactly what LeadLoft does for your team. The simplicity of LeadLoft makes it easy to set up, easy to learn, and easy to launch powerful outreach campaigns to drive new customers. 

While LeadLoft is a CRM first and foremost, its value doesn’t end there. Part of making LeadLoft easy to use required the removal of complex integrations. Although every integration can’t be removed, LeadLoft helps to reduce complexity by acting as a replacement for software solutions most commonly integrated into CRMs: 

• Prospecting Software
• Sales Engagement software

This means every LeadLoft user gets prospecting software to find leads, sales engagement software to engage leads, and CRM software to track and convert leads. This reduc

In the end LeadLoft has turned out to be a world class software that our customers love. With less software, better alignment, and a lower overhead, who wouldn’t?

Website: https://www.leadloft.com/

Best for:

• Inside Sales Teams
• Outbound Sales
• Sales Engagement
• Prospecting
  

2) HubSpot

HubSpot is an amazing software. It’s essentially the same CRM as Salesforce in terms of features but offers much better design and overall user experience. 

The nice design may lead some to believe that HubSpot is easy to use but this is far from the truth. With thousands of features, HubSpot is an extraordinarily complex and powerful piece of software. 

Teams will spend weeks, if not months, setting it up to make sure it works correctly. In the end, most teams will never set HubSpot up correctly without a dedicated team of experts implementing it and managing it on a daily basis.

For companies with the resources to set it up correctly, HubSpot is an amazing solution. Almost anything is possible with HubSpot and the limitations are few. 

Website: https://www.hubspot.com/

Best for:

• Enterprise Teams (> 100 Users)
• Companies with CRM Engineers

3) Pipedrive

Pipedrive is a relatively famous CRM and it’s one of the most popular due to the simplicity of it. It works like a traditional sales pipeline by dragging and dropping different deals down the pipeline as they get closer to closing. 

The simplicity does come with some pretty notable sacrifices however. Pipedrive has huge limitations when it comes to outreach and deal volume. Pipedrive is a very manual CRM so it only offers the most basic forms of outreach. This means teams looking to run leads through outbound sequences will have to look elsewhere if they’re interested in an effective outreach strategy. 

Pipedrive’s lack of sales features has made it clear to many that Pipedrive was built for small teams or teams with low deal volume. Many sales teams will experience growing pains as they attempt to make Pipedrive work at scale. However, for smaller teams, the simplicity can be exactly what you need. 

Website: https://www.pipedrive.com/

Best for:

• Low Deal Volume
• Solopreneurs 
• Small & Local Businesses
• Teams with Limited Scale

Wrapping Up

When it really comes down to it, the CRM you select to power your sales team will have one of the largest impacts of almost any decision you will make. It determines the strategies you use and the speed at which you can implement them. If you want to make sure your team is set up for success from the start, go with the CRM listed above that matches your company and its ambitions.