Snovio review

Growing your company means in essence increasing your sales. But that is easier said than done. It already starts with tracking down a prospect, then getting their contact info. Now you got to jump all the hurdles to deal with the gatekeepers and other sales pros. As so many clambering to get attention, no wonder the decision maker is not receptive.

Now you’ve gathered the necessary data, you still have to develop a workable method of getting our message across.

This is where Snovio can help you. Snovio is all about email outreach – and then some. It bridges the gap between you and your prospects. It helps you keep track of all the elements from finding a prospect to marketing campaigns and sales. In a nutshell, Snovio helps you and your business with relationship management and automation.

Pros and cons of Snovio

Snovio was launched in 2017 and is a CRM, email marketing, and integrated lead generation – all in one. It helps you

• find email addresses of your prospects
• reduce bounce rate thanks to its email verifier
• generate leads
• manage your contacts
• do outreach campaigns (even cold)

As you see, Snovio is made up of a bunch of tools, all to help you simplify your contact management and outreach.

Pros

• Free forever plan and you get access to its useful features
• Has a Chrome plugin that helps you find email addresses by searching by company name, domain name, or professional social media profile
• Large integration collection

Cons

• Even though the user interface is intuitive, it still requires some learning if you want to use it to its full capabilities
• Complicated pricing that is based on credits, making its costs not so easily calculated and budgeted
• Pricing may not be budget friendly
• You need to give your mobile number when you sign up

Who is Snovio for?

Businesses and individuals alike will find Snov.io useful as it can help with all the moving parts from prospecting to sales. Aside from marketing and sales, Snov.io could also be of use to HR and recruiting.

In short, it’s anyone, individuals and organisations, who need to build their contact base be it customers, suppliers, or staff.

Snovio gives you tools at hand so that you can find and verify email addresses. Then, you can reach out and start building a relationship with them.

Key features

As an outreach automation platform, Snovio comes with a range of features for lead generation, email verification, email sending, and email tracking.

Email discovery and validation

Just imagine you’d have to find the email by hand, what tasks would you go through? If you know the organisation, you probably have to find its domain. Then you’d work out the pattern of employee email. Rinse and repeat for each contact.

With Snovio, once you’ve installed the Chrome plugins, you can either find emails online or directly on LinkedIn.

If you opt for the more advanced features (you need to upgrade) you can search by company to find the decision maker. You can let Snovio compile a list of companies for your sales team. Or do you know the company but don’t know what domain it has? Snovio can help here too.

Finally, having an email address is only the start. How do you know it’s valid? You don’t want to send too many emails that bounce, it might ruin the reputation of your organisation’s domain. Snovio lets you check one or many emails at once so you only have valid emails in your list.

Email drip

Email drip campaigns are also known as autoresponders. Snovio comes with triggers, goals, and followups for you to build your campaigns. Of course, you can personalise elements in the emails.

Email tracking

Now you’ve sent the email, you also want to keep track of it. Did the recipient open it? Did they click on a link? You can keep an eye on things from within your Snovio account or install a plain and see it directly in your Gmail.

CRM

Snovio’s CRM is quite basic but it will connect your interactions with your audience and can connect it to your calendar. If you already use a CRM or need something more powerful check out its integrations.

Integrations

If you’re not starting from scratch, most likely, you and your business are already using a zoo of tools. Needless to say, you’ll want your new tool to work with your existing eco system. And Snovio doesn’t disappoint.

Snovio integrations

It has over 5’000 integrations for CRMs, teamwork, forms, customer support, and more. It also provides browser plugins – or as it calls them, extensions so that you can find, verify, and track emails right from where you are.

Snovio user interface

Snovio’s user interface is intuitive and uncluttered. After your first login, it’s best to go through its onboarding checklist.

To get the most out of Snovio, go through its onboarding checklist

It’s largely due to its large feature set, but you may need to spend a few hours reading up on things to get to grips with Snovio. It also takes time to view or read all the tutorials fefore you use a feature.

Support

It’s always a good sign if you find the chat icon in your account of a service. You can get help from Snovio’s support team and they usually respond within an hour. If you don’t like to wait, you can always access its knowledge base.

Pricing

Snovio bases its pricing on credits. These are issued according to your plan and are valid for 30 days. They renew every month. You may find that you need to purchase more credits that you then exchange to use for services making it difficult to calculate the price.

Snovio prices

Is Snovio right for you?

Running email campaigns is only the tip of the iceberg. It takes a lot to get there and while running the campaigns, you also want to keep an eye on their performance.

Snovio can take a lot off your hands:

• It can help you find the email
• It can help you manage your contacts,
• It can help you nurture your contacts

Even if you only use it to find and verify email addresses, that’ll free up a lot of your time. And you can still you your favourite email marketing tool. If you haven’t found the email marketing yet, you can may get some ideas if you browse my reviews.

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Original post here: Snovio review

Paperform review

Any time you want to collect information from your customers or visitors to your site, you’ll need a form. The information you want to know can be anything from getting feedback to contact information. If you’re not a tech whiz, chances are it’ll take ages for you to build the forms yourself or you got to get a coder to do it for you.

Paperform is similar to website builders, but it specialises in forms. It’s a versatile form builder and lets you build

• web forms
• survey forms
• quizzes
• fillable forms
• payment forms
• conditional log forms
• bookings
• in short, anything that you think needs a form

So far, it sounds like any other form builder out there. What makes it different is how it lets you build the forms – not with the usual drag-and-drop editors but it has a contextual interface. It feels like something like a word processing software.

Then the forms you can build could look like a landing page or a shopping cart. Of course, Paperform comes with a range of templates.

Pros and cons of Paperform

Paperform is a cloud-based form builder. You can use it if you need to create forms so that you can accept payments, manage bookings, collect information, and if you believe it, automate workflows without technical background.

Pros

• easy to use with an editor that looks kind of like a word processor application
• template gallery that covers many use cases

Cons

• no free forever plan

Who is Paperform for?

Paperform doesn’t target a specific industry, but forms that have built-in conditional logic forms, booking, and scoring make it a great tool for small businesses.

That said, even larger organisations like it, hence you see Paperform boast of clients such as Zapier and The World Bank.

In a nutshell, whenever you need to collect data, Paperform lets you do it without technical knowledge.

How easy is Paperform to use?

To get a feel for Paperform, you can make use of its 14 days free trial. You can start with a template or if you aren’t intimidated by a blank page, start with a blank form.

If you start with a blank page, a quick tour helps you get to grips with it

Working with a template speeds up the process. You can add as many lines to your form as you like and Paperform has nifty features such as a field for calculations or one to accept payments.

Customise a template

The editor is different from the usual gang of “drag-and-droppers”. It feels like working with a word processing application. So, no fiddly drag and drop.

Also, settings can be toggled on and off. You can find the settings in what Paperform calls Configure. If you want to accept payments, toggle it on here. You can also configure form behaviour or connect your form to Google Analytics.

The features that Paperform offers make it a handy tool for your business. If you dynamically need to change the form based on what answer the user is entering, use conditional logic. It’ll show or hide questions and so lets you customise the experience.

If you want to calculate the price of a room booking, no problem: With the calculation field, you can use Excel-style functions.

Paperform design and templates

The template gallery of Paperform holds more than 650 templates for different use cases and industries. It’s highly likely you’ll find a template: There are referral forms, request forms, booking forms, and more.

How to manage your ecommerce store in Paperform?

You can create a storefront with Paperfront but you can’t expect a full-fledged ecommerce application.

Paperform integrations

Out of the gates, Paperform offers over 2000 integrations so that it works smoothly with your existing business eco system. You can search for an add-on or browse by category.

Payment options

If you want to accept a payment, you first need to connect your account to a payment gateway such as Stripe, Braintree, or Paypal Business. You need the Agency plan if you want more options. You can then add a the price field and start accepting payments.

Calculation and price form fields

Paperform security

Paperform secures everything it hosts with SSL. It complies with the EU GDPR and offers 2FA.

Paperform customer support

Depending on your account, you get standard, priority, or first priority live support.

Paperform pricing

Paperform bases its pricing on how many submissions you get in a month. The higher the price, the more features it offers.

Paperform prices

Is Paperform the right tool for you?

If you want your forms to go further, Paperform is interesting with its conditional logic and calculation field. You can publish your forms via a WordPress plugin, share them on social media, or embed them on your website.

If you’re on a tighter budget, why not take a look at Jotform. It may not have so many advanced features but it also has conditional logic.

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Original post here: Paperform review

Freshworks review

Before things like databases and more sophisticated tools, businesses relied on manual methods and basic tools to manage customer relationships. This often involved handwritten notes, Rolodexes and even spreadsheets. What they all had in common was that they were disjointed systems. The process was time-consuming, error-prone and lacked efficiency and organisation.

Then came the era of data centres, with databases all on premises. Businesses needed resources and IT skills to install and maintain their IT systems, but it was worth it because they knew how important it was to get insightful reports so they could build relationships with their customers.

The modern business world adds another layer of complexity with the widespread use of mobile devices, social media and multiple platforms. On the other hand, the modern era also introduces valuable tools that enable businesses to navigate and enhance customer relationships more effectively.

In the dynamic world of business, fostering strong and lasting customer relationships is a cornerstone of success. The ability to understand, engage and meet the evolving needs of customers is more important than ever. The advent of CRM enables companies to improve the way they interact with their customers.

With a CRM in place, you and your sales and marketing teams can automate repetitive manual tasks, log calls and meetings, and gain insight from reports. It frees you and your team to spend as much time as possible with your customers, building relationships.

Freshworks is a complete customer engagement tool. It’s a suite of cloud-based tools for contact management, marketing, sales, communications and customer support. It started as Freshdesk in 2010 and changed its name to Freshworks in 2017. It moved its headquarters to San Mateo, US, a year later. Its clients include household names such as ITV and Bridgestone. Its customer base includes more than 50,000 organisations around the world.

Freshworks’ mission is to provide businesses with easy-to-understand tools that don’t require much setup, customisation or IT knowledge to use.

Pros and Cons

Freshworks is a set of scalable products that help you run different business processes. It’s not a single service. All the products work together to meet different needs within your business, performing different functions and streamlining different operations.

You can use them as standalone products or subscribe to all of them. The advantage of this is that you don’t have to find different service providers and get the products to work and talk to each other. You can mix and match products to create a software system that meets your unique business needs.

Pros

• Easy to get into and to use
• GDPR compliant
• Reasonable pricing
• Depending on your needs, you can choose just one product, select a few or get the whole suit.
• Mobile apps for the different products available for iOS and Android

Cons

• If there’s one criticism of Freshworks, it’s the limited customisation. But that’s to be expected, as their mission is to offer products that require little setup and customisation. There’s always a trade-off between ease of use and customisation.

Freshworks suite of products

The Freshworks suite of products are all cloud-based. They help you manage and organise aspects of your business more effectively: Customer Relationship Management (CRM) support for customer service, sales and marketing, and finally software support for IT and HR:

• Freshdesk, Freshworks’ first product, is a CRM focused on customer service across all channels. It’s a help desk with a ticketing system and centralises all your customer conversions into one team inbox.
• Freshchat is a customer messaging product that allows you to communicate with your customers no matter what chat app they’re using. This can be any web, mobile or social messenger. You can engage with your customers wherever they are, but conveniently from a single inbox.
• Freshservice is similar to Freshdesk in that it’s also a support CRM. But it’s specifically for IT. It’s specifically for you if you want to organise and manage internal processes and help IT teams work more efficiently. It has IT-specific functionality for handling incident management, change, problem and release management, and asset management.
• Freshservice for Business Teams was formerly called Freshteams. It’s the CRM to use if you want to centralise and automate HR operations.
• Freshsales is the CRM to use if you want to make the most of the efforts of your sales teams. It’s what you’d typically expect from a sales CRM, with features such as a visual sales pipeline and a system for automatically prioritising and qualifying leads.
• Freshmarketer is the CRM you want to use to automate your marketing processes and improve lead generation with Freshmarketer. It helps you run email marketing campaigns, optimise your website for maximum conversion and communicate directly with customers via email and chat.
• Freshsales Suite is the all-in-one marketing and sales solution. It’s made up of Freshmarketer and Freshsales. This suite provides everything you need to run campaigns to reach more customers, convert leads into sales and help your sales team focus on the customer.

At its core, it’s a CRM that you can use to manage the different aspects of your business. It’ll not only help you with your organisation’s contact details, it’ll also make your work easier through automation. You and your teams won’t miss a thing, whether your customers are chatting, emailing or calling you.

Who is Freshworks for?

Because you can mix and match all the different tools, Freshworks works well for startups, SMEs, and marketing and sales teams.

It’s very practical as an all-in-one CRM for small and medium-sized businesses. It’s also great if you’re moving away from manual, disparate systems. You can use one or a few products and make it work with your existing business tools thanks to a wide range of integrations.

You can use it to manage and run your HR and IT support. It’s also a good choice for your sales and/or marketing teams.

And if you’re already using one or more of their products, you can easily add another to your suite.

How easy is it to use Freshworks?

Anyone can create an account and get started. Signing up is refreshingly simple and Freshworks doesn’t ask for your credit card details.

You won’t be staring at a blank page when you sign up

Rather than letting you figure it all out from the start with a blank page, Freshworks pre-populates your account with sample data.

You can see how Freshworks lives up to its mission: It has a well-designed interface. And thanks to the sample data, it’s easy to find your way around. Navigation is simple and you can find everything you need in the menu on the left.

It’s all set up so you can get started straight away. You don’t need to spend time learning the ropes and you don’t need to configure or customise too much.

Key features

At the heart of all Freshworks products is contact management. With Freshworks, your customer data is centralised. Your marketing, sales and service teams see all interactions in one place.

Reporting

You can create custom reports. Reports are key to showing you how well you’re doing in terms of lead generation, conversion rate and other important metrics. It’s also important for you to find out if the product or service you’re selling has a flaw because it’s often reported.

Collaborate

Instead of working in silos, you can deliver a better customer experience when your marketing, sales and support teams work together. With Freshworks, your service team can easily reach out to others in your organisation to solve a problem.

Automation

You want your salespeople to do what they do best: communicate with customers and close deals. The same goes for your marketing teams: you want them to plan and launch marketing campaigns to reach more people. Finally, you want your service team to help your customers.

You want to automate tasks that are repetitive and time-consuming. Set up custom rules to automatically assign tasks. You can create sales sequences to automate repetitive tasks, such as sending welcome emails or following up with leads.

Integrations

All Freshworks products work and talk to each other out of the box. We also offer integrations with popular third-party collaboration, marketing automation, accounting and lead generation applications.

Freshworks customer support

You can use chat to get help when you’re logged into your account. You can leave a message at any time and Freshworks will respond as soon as they’re back. You can find chat and the FAQ in the question mark icon in the bottom right hand corner. You can also request a demo, ask questions about your billing and provide feedback.

Freshworks pricing

Freshworks offers a range of different products, so it should come as no surprise that prices vary depending on which product or feature you need. Each product also has 3 or 4 tiers. You get value for money with their pricing. It’s very competitive and the entry prices are very reasonable.

Some products have a forever free tier. Depending on the feature set and product, you’ll see prices ranging from $0 to $299. If you want to save 17%, you can choose to pay annually instead of monthly.

If you’re not sure what’s best for your business, talk to the Freshworks sales team – you can find phone numbers for different regions on their website.

Is Freshworks right for you?

Freshworks can be used in many different ways. Essentially, you can use any of the products on their own or in combination to help you gain insight into your customers and make the most of your marketing, sales and service efforts. It’s designed to grow with your business.

Its products can be used by entire sales, marketing and service teams, not just SMBs. Freshworks includes Freddy. Freddy is an AI tool that learns about your business and can give you insights into your deals. It can also help you chat and engage with your customers.

You can sign up to any of their products and try them out for free for 21 days if you like Freshworks.

Original post here: Freshworks review

Nimble review

In the dynamic world of business, fostering strong and lasting customer relationships is a cornerstone of success. The ability to understand, engage and meet customers’ evolving needs is more important than ever.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems have become indispensable tools for organisations seeking to foster strong and lasting relationships with their customers. A CRM system acts as a strategic tool designed to improve and streamline the way companies manage interactions with their customers.

In this context, the importance of CRM cannot be overstated, as it directly contributes to revenue growth, brand loyalty, feedback utilisation, customer retention, adaptability to change and effective reputation management.

A CRM system like Nimble acts as a central hub for storing and organising customer data. It allows you to maintain a comprehensive view of your customer interactions, including communication history, preferences and buying patterns. This consolidated information enables you and your organisation to deliver personalised and targeted interactions. This in turn increases customer satisfaction and drives growth.

The pros and cons of Nimble

As the name suggests, you use Nimble to quickly convert leads into customers. It focuses on communicating with your leads and customers. It comes with contact management, social media, sales intelligence and marketing automation; all the tools you need to build better working relationships in a multi-channel world.

Nimble is Goldmine CRM’s sibling. Unlike Goldmine, Nimble is cloud-based. As a hosted tool, all you need is a browser and an Internet connection.

Pros

• GDPR conform
• Simple and reasonable price
• Mobile apps with key features for you or your team working in the field

Cons

• Doesn’t work with all browsers
• Doesn’t resize to fit mobile devices (non-responsive)
• Surprisingly thin documentation

Who is Nimble for?

Nimble works well for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). It’s particularly useful if you want to stay in touch with your leads and customers across multiple channels and social media, and keep track of what you’re doing.

If effective customer relationship management is important to you, but you don’t want the complexity of larger enterprise solutions, you’ll love Nimble’s easy-to-use interface and feature-rich list.

Nimble caters to organisations in a wide range of industries, including marketing, sales and customer service.

How easy is Nimble to use?

Anyone can create an account and Nimble doesn’t ask for credit card details. It only takes a few moments for Nimble to get everything ready for you.

Nimble sets up your account with sample data so you get see immediately what it can do

Nimble is very visual, with a clean and attractive interface. Even for those who have not worked extensively with CRMs, it should be a hurdle to overcome. By now it should be standard for a cloud-based service to have an interface that automatically resizes to fit different screen sizes. But Nimble doesn’t do this – it’s not responsive.

Perhaps this is nitpicking, as most people will want to see the full picture and will be working on desktops anyway. And if you’re on the move, you can use the mobile apps. These are limited to the most important functions, though.

Key features

Nimble is a CRM with lead generation, customer communication and social media management features. It lets you organise and segment your contacts, send group messages, create follow-up tasks and, of course, track deals.

At its core is contact management. Nimble only allows you to store up to 25’00 contact records. If you exceed this limit, you have to fork out another $10 per month for an additional 10,000 records.

As Nimble keeps track of your communications, it builds a history of your interactions with your customers. You can tell Nimble to use Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, or an IMAP email account to build the history.

Sales Pipeline

You can view your sales pipeline in the Deals tab in the left-hand menu. You can use the predefined sales stages or create your own. Then simply drag and drop the deal from one stage to the next.

Once you associate a deal with a contact, you can see all the activity with that contact by simply clicking on a deal. It also works the other way round, with Nimble updating the deal information for the contact. It’s nice to see that you’re not limited to just one pipeline, but can create and use multiple ones.

Nimble includes a deal forecasting and pipeline analysis feature. It predicts your expected revenue from these deals based on how likely they are to close. You can review your teams’ historical or projected revenue and see which teams have performed well (or not).

Workflows and task management

Nimble lets you manage your workflows in a similar way to your sales pipeline. Your workflows work in the same way, but you can use them for your various projects, such as recruiting, influencer marketing or event management. Just like the sales pipeline, you can assign tasks to users or link them to contacts and deals.

Nimble workflow works like sales pipeline

Nimble Workflow can help you automate some tasks. You can create triggers and define actions as you move a lead through different stages of a workflow.

Nimble Prospector

Nimble offers a browser plug-in and mobile app called Prospector. Nimble Prospector is a neat helper that automatically finds and adds new contacts directly into Nimble. Whether you’re in your inbox, on LinkedIn or on a website, just hover over a contact or company name and Prospector will automatically give you as much information as it can find about them.

You can then add the new contact to Nimble or get more details such as phone number, job title and email address. You can even add notes, send emails, attach files, set reminders for contacts and add tasks.

Reporting

Without analytics and reporting, you can’t find bottlenecks and areas that need more attention. You can see the historical and projected revenue of your deals right in the sales pipeline. From the Reports tab, you can generate a variety of data-driven reports on lead sources, projected revenue and sales pipelines.

Integrations

Probably the most important integrations are for Microsoft 365, Google Workspace and your email account. These integrations will automatically keep a history of all communications between your uses was contacts.

The Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 integrations go further in that Nimble can add anything it finds in Gmail and Google Calendar to the communication history tab. It syncs what it sees back and forth between Nimble and Google Workspace. It also automatically imports what it sees in Google Contacts. But it doesn’t sync Nimble contacts with Google Contacts.

Integration with Microsoft 365 takes the crown, with contacts and calendar events synchronised between Nimble and Microsoft 365 in two ways.

Other extensions on offer include integration with popular services such as Mail Chimp or Quickbooks. If that’s not enough, you can connect via Zapier and automate your work or, if you have IT skills, use the API to create custom integrations.

Nimble customer support

You can contact Nimble customer support by email or chat. The support team is available Monday to Friday from 09:00 to 17:00 PT. You can also browse their searchable but thin knowledgebase.

Nimble pricing

Nimble makes it easy for you. It offers just 1 subscription model. For $29.9 per user per month, you don’t have to pick and choose a plan that includes the features you want. You can choose to pay monthly or annually. If you pay annually, you can save 17%. You can try Nimble free for 14 days to experience all its features.

Is Nimble right for you?

Nimble allows you to store up to 25,000 contacts. If you have more contacts, you’ll pay an additional $10 per month for each additional 10,000 contacts. There’s no upper limit either. By now it should be clear that Nimble is targeting SMBs.

SMBs looking for an integrated CRM solution that meets their unique needs and helps them streamline communications, contact management and lead nurturing will find Nimble a valuable tool.

If you don’t mind paying the additional fee if you exceed the 25,000 contact limit, Nimble is also scalable. Nimble is not for you if you want a solution that grows with you, or if you need more storage than the measly 2GB per user. If you have complex needs or simply want the space to grow into, then take a look at Creatio.

Take a look at Vtiger. Although it doesn’t quite match Nimble in terms of design and ease of use, it’s in the same price range and comes with a lot more features.

Original post here: Nimble review

Vtiger review

In the modern business landscape, a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is essential. Having a CRM means you have a central hub for managing customer interactions, streamlining processes and fostering relationships with your customers.

Having a CRM means you can make informed, data-driven decisions that keep your customers at the centre of everything you do. CRM is an integral part of any business strategy that responds to current trends and challenges. Using a CRM is not just a nice to have, it’s an essential tool for any organisation to thrive and stay competitive.

That’s where Vtiger comes in. It is designed to help you manage and maintain relationships not only with your customers, but also with partners and suppliers. It provides contact and lead management, sales automation, project management, inventory management and customer support functionality.

There are two ways to use Vtiger – you can go all out and install, host and configure the open source CRM or subscribe to the cloud-based paid version. For this review, I’m going to write about the paid hosted version.

Pros and cons of Vtiger

When you use Vtiger, you can store customer data, track interactions and manage communications all in one place. It includes tools for automating tasks, tracking deals and analysing sales performance.

It also has project management capabilities so you can coordinate and monitor projects within the CRM. In other words, you can do everything from lead prospecting to post-sales engagement.

With its customisation options, you can tailor it to your specific needs. To make it work with your existing business tools, Vtiger offers integrations with third party applications.

Pros

• GDPR conform
• Email and phone integration included in all plans
• Forever free plan for up to 10 users but with limited file storage and smaller feature set
• Submit ticket via email included in all plans
• Extensive feature list minimises the need to use extensions and third party integrations
• Supports multiple currencies
• Stellar customer care
• Mobile app to manage your contacts on the go

Cons

• The 15 days free trial period might be a bit short to really experience all of Vtigers features
• Needs a pristine internet connection

Who is Vtiger for?

If you’re looking for a way to centralise and keep track of all your marketing and sales efforts, Vtiger is a good choice. It works best for

• small businesses facing challenges around sales and after sales
• small businesses aiming to centralise and doing digital marketing
• midsized business looking to have one tool for sales, marking and support teams to collaborate and close deals
• startups to get their sales and marketing efforts rolling
• sales teams in all kinds of organisations thanks to its lead scoring, segmentation, and the task and deal management tools

The pricing also indicates that these groups are the ideal customers for Vtiger.

How easy is Vtiger to use?

In contrast to other CRMs such as Salesforce, Vtiger doesn’t unnecessarily make the process but it can complicated, but it can take a while for Vtiger to set everything up for you.

Vtiger shows you the most important buttons after provisioning your instance (just click on the screen to get to your account)

A lot of thought has gone into designing a clean user interface. But let’s face the facts: you’re going to need to invest a bit of time to get to grips with Vtiger. That’s all due to the fact that Vtiger is an all-in-one CRM with a ton of features.

Vtiger lets you access its long list of features through a nested menu interface

Having a minimal and clean user interface means that Vtiger puts its long list of features into a nested menu interface. The nested menu means that you don’t get a crowded and cluttered menu where you can get frustrated or confused. But it’s also easy to forget where the information is hidden.

That’s the trade-off you’ll always have: Do you want a comprehensive feature set, or do you want convenience and ease of use? It’s a shame that Vtiger doesn’t pre-populate your CRM with sample data to guide you.

Key features

Vtiger’s is an all-in-one CRM, hence the large feature set. The core feature, of course, is contact management. It’s where you store, organise and track contact information along with interaction history. Contact management gives you a holistic view of your customer and allows you to contact them with the right information when they want it.

You can then use it to build your sales pipeline and segment your contacts for marketing campaigns.

Sales Automation

Use Vtiger CRM’s sales automation to reduce tedious and repetitive tasks such as capturing leads from multiple sources such as website forms, emails and social media. What’s not to like when you can set up workflows in minutes and then save time and effort by not having to remember to follow up with a customer next week? With Vtiger, you can set it up to send proactive alerts and notifications to help you stay on top of leads – a nice low-tech way to ensure the pipeline stays active.

Deal Management

Vtiger allows you to efficiently organise, monitor and progress your sales pipeline. It allows you to set deal parameters, customise deal stages and create custom fields to track data such as estimated close dates and key contacts.

A visual representation of the sales pipeline allows you to track the progress of deals and identify potential bottlenecks or areas of focus. This enables you to gain insight into your deal pipeline and make data-driven decisions to drive growth.

Forecasting

Speaking of data-driven decisions, because Vtiger gives you a holistic view of your customer interactions, it shows you whether you’re on track to meet your sales targets. Based on historical data, Vtiger predicts future sales so you can allocate resources effectively and prioritise your sales efforts.

Calculus AI

As AI advances by leaps and bounds, Vtiger’s AI assistant, Calculus AI, can recommend your next best action. Based on conversation analysis, Calculus AI can determine the best time to contact customers, suggest email subject lines and assist live agents in crafting the ideal response message. Calculus AI can also track and analyse sentiment, score deals and predict sales.

Reporting

Vtiger constantly monitors and analyses your data and comes up with a load of reports for sales, marketing, employee performance, and more. It lets you keep a close eye on your metrics such as

Leads by source
Monthly activities
Sales insights
Invoice reports
Activity trends
Contacts emailed

Help desk

Vtiger is not only a useful tool for marketing and sales but also for your post sales activities. Your support agents can see all historic interactions and collaborate with your marketing and sales team so that your business can provide context-aware assistance.

Inventory management

You can also use Vtiger to manage the supply side of your business. It allows you to manage all information about your products and services, including serial numbers, images, descriptions, prices and quantities. With centralised stock management, you can monitor stock movements, track purchases and sales, and generate accurate stock reports. In other words, you can avoid overstocking or understocking.

Integrations

The comprehensive feature list reduces the need to find and use integrations and plug-ins. If you still need something more, you can browse the built-in add-ons and integrations (see below).

A huge library of integrations

You can find and add paid or free integrations. Vtiger offers integrations to popular services like Quickbooks, Mailchimp or Magneto.

Vtiger customer support

Vtiger is popular because of its excellent and responsive support. You can get help through their chat support and submit a ticket via email regardless of your subscription. You can also take advantage of their training resources, webinars and online community forums.

Vtiger pricing

At first glance, Vtiger’s pricing structure looks confusing and you need to dig deeper. Vtiger generally offers a free plan and two paid plans, but the two paid plans are further divided into standard and single application.

The standard price means you have full access to all modules, including sales, tagging and service. The Single App price gives you full access to only one aspect and all the others are read-only.

The paid plans include a 15-day free trial period. It’s good to see that you can take Vtiger for a spin without handing over your credit card details.

In summary, you get

• A Pilot, the forever free plan for up to 10 users
• One Professional Standard at $42 per month per user
• One Professional single application at $28 per month per user
• One Enterprise Standard at $58 per user per month
• One Enterprise single application at $42 per month per user

As you can see from the pricing, Vtiger is aimed at small and medium sized businesses as well as start-ups.

Is Vtiger the right tool for you?

Choose Vtiger if you want an affordable, full-featured CRM with excellent customer support.

Vtiger isn’t for you if you’re a marketing or creative agency. Although its marketing features are solid and you won’t lose money, you may get more out of a CRM that specialises in this sector. Similarly, large organisations and businesses won’t get what they need because they have complex needs. In both cases, you might want to look at Creatio or Hubspot.

Original post here: Vtiger review

Insightly review

What are the greatest assets in your company? Your relationship with your customers. By building and nurturing your relationships, you build a loyal customer base that you can count on. Your customer base is key because it brings business to you and can also recommend partners to you.

So you want to build your customer base and your reputation. You want to make sure you don’t drop the ball. Once your reputation is gone, it could be the end of you. Maintaining your relationship isn’t as difficult as it seems, thanks to customer relationship management (CRM) tools.

A CRM serves as a central hub for managing customer interactions and streamlining processes. A CRM like Insightly helps you organise customer data, track leads and sales, and effectively nurture relationships.

Pros and cons of Insightly

Insightly is an all-in-one, cloud-based CRM that makes it easy for teams to collaborate and manage the sales pipeline. It’s a cloud-based CRM, so essentially all you and your team need is an internet connection and a browser to work from anywhere.

As a CRM, Insightly comes with the tools you need to track contacts, leads and projects, convert leads into opportunities and manage every step of the sales process.

Pros

• Easy to use
• Free forever plan for 2 users
• GDPR compliant

Cons

• Only phone and email support, no chat support
• Complete workflow automations on on high tier plans
• No backup of your data

Who is Insightly for?

Regardless of your business sector or size, if you want to manage your relationships with customers, suppliers and partners, Insightly is for you. It’s suitable for a range of organisations, from small to large, that want to centralise customer information, streamline processes and improve overall efficiency in managing relationships and projects.

It’s a good place to start because it offers all the CRM functionality you could need, from lead management to mass emailing. As Insightly also includes project and task management, it’s ideal for agencies and freelancers. This combination of project management and CRM means you can support clients throughout their entire customer lifecycle.

How easy is it to use Insightly?

When you first create your account, Insightly will ask you to invite your team members. You and your colleagues can get to work straight away thanks to the well-designed interface. You’ll find everything organised and labelled in a way that makes it easy to find the features you need without confusion.

Anyone can jump into Insightly and get started right away

Use the left-hand side menu to switch between screens and sections. Insightly offers four dashboards, each with a different focus: Recent, Activity, Opportunities and Projects. You can easily add, delete, modify or move items on these dashboards. You can also create entirely new dashboards.

Key features

At its core, Insightly helps businesses manage customer relationships. It lets you manage opportunities more efficiently with a system for tracking all the pipeline stages. It lets you send mass emails in segmented lists from contacts to target sales, automate workflow, and manage projects all under one centralised roof. You can and your team have don’t need to scramble around when you want to find customer information and it makes data access so much easier.

Automation

You can save time while also communicating with your customers when they want by using Insightly’s automated workflows. Insightly offers personalised templates and automated follow-ups. You can also automate tasks and reports as well as create and send pricing quotes and proposals directly within Insightly.

You’ll also want to take advantage of the marketing automation to help you create your funnels, including embedded lead capture forms and landing pages. What you don’t get are email marketing features – you’ll need to subscribe to Insightly’s separate marketing service.

Project and task management

Managing marketing and sales tasks and projects can be a pain, especially when each team uses a different tool for project management, marketing and CRM. Once a prospect has converted, you can turn an opportunity into a project, all within Insightly. There’s no loss of time or information between closing an opportunity and starting to work on the deliverables.

All records and details from the opportunity are visible from the project view. You and your teams can collaborate and communicate with specific milestones and details of all interactions to improve the customer experience.

Reporting

Out of the box, Insightly gives you 4 dashboards and a separate reporting tab with an extensive list of pre-built reports. These give you a comprehensive view of all aspects of your business, from sales and marketing to task and project management.

These reports and the dashboard make it easy to track your progress and identify areas for improvement. You can share reports with your staff or schedule them to be automatically emailed to you.

Insightly integrations, extensions and plugins

Insightly’s 2000+ integrations make the service a versatile and flexible CRM that you can easily integrate into your existing ecosystem. The integrations can be categorised into (non-exhaustive list)

• Productivity
• Collaboration
• HR management
• Accounting
• Operations

Perhaps most notably, you can connect to Google Suite. If you connect Insightly to your Google Mail (you can send emails from within Insightly).

Insightly’s customer support

That’s where Insightly falls short. You can call or email the support team, but there’s no chat support.

Insightly prices

You can sign up and try Insightly for free for 14 days. If you’re working in a team of 2, take advantage of Insightly’s free forever plan. Insightly offers different subscriptions so it can grow with your business.

Insightly prices

Is Insightly the right tool for you?

Overall, Insightly offers robust contact and opportunity functionality combined with project management. This combination means there’s no delay between closing a deal and getting to work.

It’s also easy to integrate Insightly with your other business tools, thanks to its extensive integration collection.

However, Insightly lacks chat customer support and doesn’t back up your data. There’s also a limit to the number of records you can store, and the file storage itself is limited.

If you’re a startup, agency or SMB, it’s almost a no-brainer given Insightly’s feature set. If you need something more robust and have the deep pockets, take a look at Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Original post here: Insightly review

Snappages review

Today, low or no code website builders mean that you can build a website by simply dragging and dropping elements onto your page. Snappages was one of the first, and if you can believe it, the first website builder to come out and changed the way people build websites. In doing so, it democratised website building and empowered anyone to create a professional website.

Snappages was launched in 2008, making it one of the pioneers of drag and drop builders. This gives Snappage an edge in ease of use, especially for beginners.

Pros and cons of Snappages

Snappages lives up to its name as you can launch a website in a snap. You can launch your company website, blog and landing pages by simply selecting a template from the gallery and customising it with drag and drop.

Snappages is a cloud-based service, which means you get hosting and maintenance by subscribing to one of their plans. You access the service through your browser and all you need is an internet connection.

Pros

• Generally reliable and responsive support
• Easy to use
• You get a versions history and can revert to a previous version
• Transparent prices

Cons

• Limited selection of website templates
• No builtin integrations, plugins or extensions
• No undo button

Who is Snappages for?

Snappages isn’t a website builder with all the bells and whistles you might expect after using Duda, Jimdo and Ucraft.

It comes with the obligatory drag and drop editor (duh!), responsive website templates (which should be standard these days!) and a blogging tool. Thankfully, it also has a built-in form builder, a gallery tool and allows you to embed code snippets.

Have I lost you with the term “code snippet”? Embedding, or in Snappages’ words, injecting code snippets, is how Snappages lets you add 3rd party services such as YouTube to your site. However, this requires you to know a little bit of code.

All in all, Snappages gives you the basics you need to get your website up and running. It will also make your website look great. Over the last decade and more, Snappages has refined its user interface so that it’s very easy to use, especially for those just starting out.

How easy is it to use Snappages?

You literally start by choosing your template, even before you create your account. A helpful short tutorial will show you the basic features of Snappages. Snappages is so well designed that you can easily skip the tutorial and start editing your website right away if you want to.

Snappage editor

A web page in Snappages is made up of sections and blocks. Each section is made up of a block, and you can stack as many sections on top of each other until you get what you want. Of course, you can build your page using sections and blocks however you like.

Snappages present tools and options in the context of what you’re doing, giving you the optimal tools for the task at hand. You’ll see menus, toolbars and settings change according to what you’re doing.

Of course, you can customise the fonts, colours and branding on each page. You can also create and customise forms. Unfortunately, as sophisticated as Snappages is, you won’t find an undo button. Instead, you can create versions of your website and revert to a previous version if you need to.

Snappages design and themes

Snappages only offers 9 templates, all of which are included in the plans. Of course, they’re all mobile responsive, which should be standard by now and a knock-out criterion for a website builder that doesn’t offer mobile responsive templates.

Limited choice of templates

Snappages allows you to stack sections to make up a page, so it also offers a selection of page sections.

How to manage your ecommerce store in Snappages?

Snappages doesn’t offer a built-in e-commerce tool. Instead, you need to insert or embed code snippets throughout your website. This means you’ll need to embed a service like Cartloom or Ecwid to add e-commerce functionality to your site.

Snappages integrations

Just as Snappages doesn’t have a built-in ecommerce tool, it doesn’t have a gallery or app store for extensions, integrations or plugins. Instead, it allows you to embed code snippets anywhere on your website using its custom code block.

This works well with services like Google Maps, Youtube and Shopify. The main drawback is that you need to understand a bit about code snippets or embedding code.

Blog

For Snappages, a blog is made up of different blocks, all categorised as Blog blocks. You get a Posts block, an Archive block, a Categories block and a Tags block.

Payment options

If you don’t want to use a service like Cartloom or Ecwid, you can use the Snappages custom code block to embed something like a Paypal buy now button.

Snappages customer support

Snappages prides itself on its live chat for all customers. The response time is reasonable and you can expect a reply from the support team within hours. There’s also a searchable help centre.

Snappages pricing

Snappages doesn’t offer a free plan, but you can try it for free for 14 days. It does offer a basic plan at $15 a month, which is best if you’re just starting out or don’t need its advanced editing features.

Snappages prices

Advanced features means that Snappages has less of what you can change and more features such as animated transitions, more storage and more typographic control.

Is Snappages the right tool for you?

Snappages allows you to create snappy and crisp websites that are perfect for your personal or small business website. If you don’t need third party integrations like Youtube or Mailchimp, Snappages is a builder that requires very little technical knowledge from you and you can have a website up and running in no time.

However, if you want to go even faster and with less hassle, you could try some of the AI-powered website builders such as Bookmark or Mixo.

Original post here: Snappages review