Apptivo is a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) tool. But it’s so much more. In fact, it offers a suite of tools that make it quite indispensable to running a business. Aside from CRM, it offers 60+ features to help you manage your projects, develop products, invoice your customers, and oversee your supply chains. It’s defacto an end-to-end business solution and you can add any of these features to make it work for your business.
And, you’ll like the bottom line. It’s a very cost-effective option. Especially, when you consider that you don’t need to hunt for, implement, and integrate with other, separate applications and tools to manage your financial data and other tasks.
Back in 2009, Apptivo was launched by Bastin Gerald to help small businesses to collaborate with customers and partners. Now, it serves its customers in over 190 countries all around the world. It’s headquartered in San Francisco Bay Area, US.
Pros and cons of Apptivo
Apptivo is a very affordable option if you’re looking to have a CRM complete with email marketing, analytics and reporting, invoicing, and contract management. In short, it offers a suite of applications – Apptivo calls them apps – to help your business thrive.
Since it’s cloud-based, you can work from anywhere in the world as long as you have an internet connection and a browser. You can also work with your team, even if they’re not sitting across your desk.
Pros
- cost-effective prices
- signup without credit card
- easy to use
- mobile app allows you to work on the go
- responsive and competent support team available 24/7
Cons
- It’s probably more a question of taste but it can look a bit outdated
- You can customise about anything you want, meaning you may need some time adjusting to it
- Can be a bit slow a times
Who is Apptivo for?
Don’t let Apptivo’s origins fool you. Its end-to-end business solution works for business of any size, starting from a solopreneur to enterprises with thousands of users. You can use it to
- automate and keep track of your sales
- plan and execute marketing campaigns
- keep track of your customers and suppliers
- billing and invoicing
- analytics and reports
- manage your projects
- manage your contracts
- Manage your expenses
if you’re just one person in your business, or sales teams of any size, and even large organisations. This feat is possible because Apptivo has a nice and intuitive interface AND it gives you a ton of customisation options. You can start using it and it will grow along your business when you scale.
The centre piece is of course the CRM. It helps you keep track of your contacts and find and grow your network. Hence it’s a good option for marketers to reach more people as well as for sales people to see at which stage a contact is, find opportunities, and close more deals.
How easy is Apptivo to use?
During the onboarding process, Apptivo will suggest apps to install along your setup. But you can always add and remove apps in your account.
The first page for Apptivo is your agenda where you can see all your work laid out in a calendar view. You’ll find Apptivo’s key features in the main navigation at the top. Of course, you can customise the main navigation and page layout to suit your needs. It’s a good idea to invest a little time to customise it to your preference which will help you save time down the road.
The interface is clean and easy to use, making it nice and easy to navigate. Although for some, it may look a bit outdated.
Key features
Apptivo has an almost impossibly long feature list with CRM as the centre piece. Together with its long list of apps, it covers commerce, supply chain and procurement management, and even employee dispatch for managing field service. Needless to say, it has rock-solid reporting so that you can drill down into your financials.
Instead of switching between your tabs or apps, Apptivo will sync data between Google Workspace, Office 365, and other apps.
Contacts
At the centre of any business are its contacts, regardless if they’re suppliers, partners, or customers. You can follow a contact throughout their entire life cycle. A sensible feature is that you can add new contacts from emails or web forms. You’ll also find it useful that duplicate rules will help you keep your contact management clean.
Having contact management also allows you to see when a contact becomes a lead. It allows you to discover opportunities and push them down your sales funnel. Apptivo helps you get in touch at the right times with its workflow scheduler.
Email marketing
You don’t need to work with a separate email marketing provider. You’ll find Apptivo comes with email templates, segmenting (duh!), and campaigns. Once sent, you can keep an eye on email open rates, click-through rates, bounces, and more.
Project management
It’s easy to get lost when you got a lot on your plate and even more so if work in a team. Apptivo helps you get organised, starting with individual task management that can be grouped and arranged by tasked or assigned to an employee.
You can also keep track of time worked on projects with timesheets which then also are part of invoicing and project reporting.
Web help desk
Covering the entire life cycle of a customer means you don’t just stop your service after sales. You’re also here to help when a customer hits a wall with your service or product. Apptivo gives you a ticketing system for customer service.
Apptivo integrations
Apptivo itself is already a highly feature-rich tool to help you streamline the different processes in your business. It’s no exaggeration to say that you can conduct every aspect of your business in Apptivo.
Still, nowadays, it’s normal to already use other suites of tools such as Google Workspace. Needless to say, it’ll add to your workload if you constantly need to switch between these tools because data is missing.
You can connect your application with a custom-made integration with the help of its API to pull in data.
Apptivo customer support
When you’re logged into your account, you can always pull up the help tool that hovers at the bottom of each page and chat with the support team. There’s also the option to call if you prefer to talk instead of type. You can reach support 24/7 regardless of the plan you subscribed to.
Apptivo pricing
There’s no free plan but a generous 30 days free trial period and Apptivo lets you sign up without a credit card. Apptivo bases its pricing on user count, that is, how many users are going to use it in your business.
Apptivo is excellent value for money. It’s a highly integrated app that comes with many features so that you can conduct every aspect of your business all within your account. This also translates into you saving a lot of time. Time that you’d otherwise wasted in finding another tool and then making it talk to Apptivo.
Is Apptivo the right tool for you?
Apptivo is a strong contender if you’re looking for a CRM provider. It works for one-person businesses and enterprise-scale organisations. If you only look at its price, it’s in the range of Zoho, Pipedrive, and the like. But if you then take all the features it comes with, you get incomparably more bang for your buck.
Another advantage is that it can scale along with your business. You can build a CRM that exactly satisfies your needs. Last but not least, it has a competent support team that is reachable 24/7.
Original post here: Apptivo review
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