CRM is important to your company, whether you’re targeting new or existing clients. It doesn’t matter if you are just a new company or a firm that already has a rapidly-expanding sales team: you need a good CRM tool that will allow you to see and examine analytics while at the same time enabling you to establish good communication with your customers.
Two of the major CRM products in the market today are Salesforce and Zoho CRM. Salesforce is one of the biggest and award-winning tools out there. Like Salesforce, Zoho is also one of the brightest and most trusted names in the CRM product landscape today.
Which tool is better for your business? Below is a detailed analysis of both tools including their strong and weak points, features, details on which one works better for various types of businesses, their price and other important factors that may affect your choice.
Advantages and Disadvantages
Without doubt, Salesforce is a good CRM solution. However, it is clearly created for large teams of salespeople. If you are a small business owner or a startup and you want to use Salesforce for your company, you may find the tool to be a bit of an overkill.
Zoho, in comparison, has an outstanding assortment of pricing and service plans for various sizes of business. The service plans scale appropriately. Thus, as your business and your sales team grow, you can add more features you need to your current plan.
Salesforce
Overall, both are full-featured CRM solutions. In short, anything your business needs, you are certainly going to get it from both of the tools. In terms of the most interesting and numerous features however, Zoho also has a clear advantage over Salesforce.
Unique features of Salesforce include:
App Exchange (where you can find APIs)
Chatter (a quasi-social media function that allows you to track major events and clients)
On the other hand, Zoho’s interesting features are:
Social Media Integration (which includes Facebook and Twitter) with the priciest plans giving you additional social media functions, such as the capacity to capture leads
Proximity Alerts for Mobile (for strengthening relationships with clients).
In terms of pricing, you may feel Zoho is the better option for you. Salesforce is mainly designed for big teams, so the tool’s pricing structure reflects this as well. You can have a 30-day trial account for free, but the cheapest plan begins at $25 per user a month. You can have unlimited members and more features in the pricier plans.
Zoho CRM
In case you want to test the tool’s features first Zoho has a free plan too. Other plans begin at $12 per user each month. The features you’ll get increase with the more expensive plans, but with the basic package you can have mass emailing and campaigns features. In Salesforce, these features are only available with the $65/user/month package. What is more, Zoho’s highest-tiered package still costs relatively less than the mid-level package from Salesforce.
Salesforce has some advantages though. For example, it offers better integrations and add-ons than Zoho. While both have outstanding integrations, Salesforce allows you to access countless user reviews for different third-party integrations available through the App Exchange.
Salesforce also offers better customer service and technical support than Zoho. Both offer standard customer service and technical support features (such as online support, phone support, help resources etc.) However, even with a standard Salesforce plan, a case manager will handle all your queries with a guaranteed response time of two days.
Head to Head Matchup
Price
$25/user/month (billed annually)
$12 per user/month (billed annually) or $15 month-to-month
Sales Force Automation
Yes
Yes
Customer Service & Support
Yes
Yes
Marketing Automation
Yes
Yes
CRM Project Management
Yes
Yes
CRM Reporting & Analytics
Yes
Yes
Customization
Yes
Yes
Security
Yes
Yes
Social CRM
Yes
Yes
Integrations with third-party Software
Yes
Yes
Platform
Yes
Yes
Permissions
Yes
Yes
Campaigns
Yes
Yes
Data Storage
1 GB per org
Unlimited
File Storage
612 MB per user
(2 GB for enterprise plans)
512 MB per user
(1 GB for enterprise plans)
Territory Management
Yes
Yes
At the marketing front, Salesforce provides you with some great advantages:
You can get more leads by getting the right information about them, and scoring them, and then assigning them to the workers to avoid the loss of a lead
It lets you set up targeted campaigns for specific customers using territory management
You can monitor the status of your deals and handle miscalculation and other incidents for successful closing
You can create quotes based on the data you get from acquired products and disseminate them among your targeted customers
It’s possible to create personalized and targeted emails that can help you engage target clients with your marketing campaigns
You can also track the responses of customers about your services
Zoho is not bereft of opportunities for a better business performance as well. It gives you the following advantages:
You can get generate and qualify sales leads, and even enhance your conversion and retention rates
The tool gives you the capacity to segment your customer market, improving the creation of targeted campaigns as well as special offers
The tool’s web forms enable you to get in touch with new contacts and more cases to gather more relevant data
Campaign management gives you the opportunity to manage the performance of your projects
Mass mailing, which is Zoho’s main marketing tool, helps you in following up with clients
You can streamline your entire sales process by means of order, quotes, and purchase orders
Zoho offers invoicing options to enhance payments
Salesforce provides businesses with a high-level clients support, including options such as case management by phone, email, and social networks, customer self-help communities, and knowledge base with relevant content. Your company may use the gathered data culled from social media to figure out and prevent negative issues and questions.
Zoho on the other hand offers various features for qualitative and fast customer service: help desk management, ticket management, and knowledge base. You can also route and escalate various concerns using web-to-case forms and monitoring issues posted on websites. Another useful option is the synchronization of certain client emails into your cases.
Salesforce gives you a 360-degree customer view that gathers all the critical lead and customer data in one place. The workflow optimizes and automates all the processes within the company. You can set up automatic alerts, tasks distribution and drive deals through all the stages. What is more, every department or worker can create detailed reports.
Apart from data centralization, Zoho offers the workflow for automation of all business processes specific to your requirements and rules. You can route leads, tasks, cases and create alerts and notifications that will be sent under specified conditions. With robust Zoho analytics, you can also create various filters for deep reports and share them within other departments for enhanced collaboration and maximized efficiency of future campaign performance.
Salesforce provides businesses with the capacity to allow access to some data only for specific profiles and groups. You can also backup and restore your records. In addition, as well as customize the tool to suit your needs. However, Salesforce offers limited room for personalization, plus it depends on the plan you use. The tool also offers mobile access to your data and improves the uptime of your teams.
Zoho ensures your data are private and secure. The tool offers a role-based access as well as data encryption to avoid any hacker attacks. There is also an option to do scheduled records backup. This service is paid, but you can cancel this feature.
Both Zoho and Salesforce provide users with mobile access and flexible customization level. Users who have administrative authority can add or delete layouts, sections, modules, and fields. Both solutions also integrate with Microsoft Office. Thus, data such as contact information from Outlook, can travel without any substantial roadblocks between various software packages.
Both solutions will work fine on any device provided there is a good internet connection. In terms of software, both tools are readily compatible with the up-to-date versions of Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Chrome.
Both tools offer cloud-based solutions with mobile apps that are available on Android and iPhone. With both tools, you will need either iOS 5.0 or Android 2.2 to run the latest versions without issues. While both Salesforce and Zoho have mobile apps, they are not a full substitute for a laptop version with a real web browser. That is why both tools are readily compatible with the latest Safari, Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer versions. Salesforce has also created several mobile tools over the years.
Conclusion
So which tool is better? Both tools are undoubtedly impressive and offer excellent CRM features. However, Zoho has a few benefits that make it a better choice than Salesforce, particularly in terms of features and pricing. Zoho has every feature you’d expect from a good CRM tool, so why pay more for the same features? If you are a small business company or you’ve just established a startup, then Zoho will be a better tool for you. However, if you’re a company that is already established with extensive custom CRM needs, then Salesforce is also a very good option.
The post Zoho CRM vs Salesforce: Comparison of Top CRM Software Services appeared first on Financesonline.com.