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Looking for an affordable CRM solution
Which CRM software did you use for your business? I'm looking for an affordable CRM solution.
Thanked by 1homelabber
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You mean billing?
No, it's different. It's called Customer Relationship Management.
Looks like it is something for enormous soulless corpos
It depends on what you need from the CRM solution. If you are self hosting, try Odoo or CiviCRM, lot of work to set them up and maintain though, but both are reliable and stable from my experience.
Nearly every successful company ever has sales and advertising teams 😂 — there’s nothing soulless about managing the process of converting a prospect into a customer.
If you sell a good product or service, you should feel obligated to sell it to more people.
OP: All Zoho products are awful, but cheap. ActiveCampaign and HubSpot work well, but you’ll pay for them. You’re paying for everything you can automate.
Well, I agree that any business needs advertisements, but personally I don't get the "CRM" usefulness.
If I am not mistaken, this functionality is already present in the most billing systems.
Nobody would know about you otherwise.
Advertising can be as simple as posting helpful content on your blog (or forums), it’s how you obtain attention and build trust. You actively advertise everyday you post here.
CRMs are how you keep following up with prospect relationships to convert them from a visitor into a client.
Content marketing / blog - awareness
Sales / CRM - conversion
But CRM does not advertise brand on its own! You need human for it to order an advertisement, to handle potential clients asking about your offer and support tickets if there are any.
To keep a track from where traffic is going you can create separate hidden offers and/or embed tracking UTM parameter
Right, which is why a human generates awareness and then you put them in your CRM pipeline to convert on the backend.
A CRM helps sales focus on what they’re supposed to be doing: selling. It automates the follow up, specifically based on smart actions such as timing intervals, pages visited, calls scheduled, calls scheduled and then not attended, etc.
Though at your price point it rarely makes sense to have a sales team. You’re essentially D2C whereas someone like @Hivelocity is closing multiple thousand dollar infrastructure contracts selling B2B.
Also, analytics are totally separate, but are indeed important. You should be tracking things like conversion costs, average lifetime value, churn rate, and so on.
So, as I said previously,
There is perflex crm - something like that, it’s based on Wordpress. One off fee and host it. Think it’s on themeforest
Try to avoid codecanyon bs. Go for tiger crm.
In addition to no soul, I have no reflection when looking in the mirror. You better watch out.
Zoho is good. Recommended to a lot of local businesses & they are happy using it.
flowlu
Even within this thread there's differing opinions on Zoho. You can't knock their pricing though...for what you get their pricing is solid. Know someone who used them for invoice/billing management, swore by them.
Are there any specific features you’re looking for in your future CRM?
Well, if you're into selfhosting, you can try ERPnext. You'll get a CRM + a lot more.
@tentor your take is so binary, nerdy and in many ways wrong, but I love it so I agree
I’d say needing a CRM dosen’t mean you’re a soulless big corp, it does, however, mean that the people working for you, with said tool, will be soulless
I believe Odoo is an excellent ERP and CRM software, plus it's free for self-hosting
There is ZOHO crm software.
The businesses whom I recommend to use Zoho are small & medium scale brick & mortar businesses.
I use Zoho CRM (along with invoicing & bookkeeping) for one of my family biz since 2019 and trust me, it really helped us focus on other core areas of the biz.
Could you please share the advantages of using CRM for a hosting business?
For hosting business, I don't feel Zoho CRM is appropriate.
Do you have any other recommendations?
Rise CRM
@Uchiha It might be helpful to get some more information so that people can reccommend what's best to fit your needs. You mentioned applying a CRM to a hosting business and what the benefits might be. If you want to subscribe to CRM software but aren't sure what the benefits to your use case are, are you sure you need one?
If you share more specifics about what problem you're looking to solve for your business, I'm sure people would be happy to make some more specific suggestions!
CRM is only as good as the developer and user are.
small businesses not dealing with much B2B probably may not benefit as much.
Perfexcrm, been using it for a while, works great and very active in terms of development.