Act! CRM (formerly Swiftpage) aims to empower small businesses to build and manage client relationships and leads, so the user always has a pipeline of new, repeat, and referral business under control. Users can manage their businesses with Act! CRM every day, since it’s more than a CRM – it’s designed to present everything needed to stay on top of relationships, see what’s most important and actionable, and run sales and marketing in one place.
$30
per month (billed annually) per user
SAP Sales Cloud
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
SAP Sales Cloud (formerly SAP Cloud for Sales) is a cloud sales application with sales automation, enterprise resource planning (ERP) integration, and collaboration capabilities.
Swiftpage ACT! would be well suited if you are using a desktop computing environment. ACT! is an old product and they were on the desktop for many years (and still are). Also, ACT! would also be well suited if you are not as concerned about implementing a CRM product that might require a little more training (e.g. if you had employees/salespeople that needed to be trained). Also, ACT! seems to be more generic than some of the industry focused products you see nowadays. For example, MethodCRM works well with non-profits that are on the cloud.
SAP Sales Cloud is highly suited for manufacturing and distribution enterprises and especially for people and companies who are already into SAP architecture. It is also great for industries which are consumer-packaged goods oriented, and it is highly structured for B2B sales which has predictive pipelines. I would say it is less suited for hyper growth or newer startups, especially people who are not familiar with the SAP ERP. It is multi-dimensional and has complex matrix structures, so it is a bit difficult to learn, and it might be daunting for new people.
Integrated Email Marketing: For a small business, you can have a strong method to handle email marketing in an integrated non-disparate solution.
Tailoring: There are no limits on what data you can store in the system and the ease of making changes can be done by a nontechnical person.
User Interface: The tool is easy to get around in both the desktop (fat client) and (webclient) which both are quite similar in functionality.
Integration: The tool integrates with Word, Excel, and Outlook nicely. And, it integrates with Google Mail and Contacts. There is a nice selection of third party tools available for various needs like AddressGrabber which allows for easy input of contacts from various sources such as email signatures, webpages, etc.
Templates: I have enjoyed being able to store tons of various templates for letters which we use over and over for various communications like sales proposals, quotes, and nudging clients along the funnel and sales process.
Automation: SwiftPage ACT! has a small business automation engine which allows for reminders and workflow to be administered by the system. It's not as sophisticated as some enterprise workflow automation solutions but for the price it's an awesome addition.
Maintenance: Very rarely have a problem which needs to be dealt with and costs to upgrade are minimal at best. We hosted the system internally for the web client and implemented it ourselves initially but had upgrades subsequently done by a local partner simply due to time/cost scenario. In other words, less to have someone else do it.
Once our current subscription expires, we no longer plan to use ACT. We are moving to a more complete CRM system that allows us, as a project based service company, to track projects, contacts, time and employees all with one software program. ACT has very limited modules to integrate these functions and therefore is no longer a good fit for us.
SAP sales enables organizations to manage their sales activities, such as inquiries, quotations, orders, deliveries, billing, and payments. Also integrates with other SAP modules, such as finance, logistics, and marketing, to provide a comprehensive solution for managing the entire sales cycle. thats makes SAP a good choice
ACT follows the basic rules you would expect for this type of software, but actually doing anything sophisticated with it is near impossible without assistance or training. Unless you use it regularly it is difficult to use. I wouldn't recommend it unless you have internal IT support and it will be used regularly.
In short, SAP CRM is a complete service that will help improve marketing strategy and productivity. It covers various topics, from big data analytics to resource management and housing sales data. SAP CRM has a long list of features and can do them all.
There has been an ongoing problem with Google synchronisation which no one seems to be bothered about fixing, even though it clearly states on the website that the software synchronises with Google. When the customer-facing support team are on the phone, they are brilliant, it's the back-end development support which is severely lacking.
SAP's customer service is quick and efficient, with a response time of fewer than some minutes. In either case, you'll get instant help from the vendor or online forums. In addition, the vendor provides excellent global support for this tool. Like Salesforce, SugarCRM, etc., it's probably fine as a standalone CRM option.
Training was mostly completed over a couple conference calls, and reading the API documentation. Our developers were able to implement quickly after reading the documentation.
I would rate the implementation a 7. While the process overall was successful, there were challenges related to data migration, integration with other systems, and initial user adoption. However, the support from SAP during the implementation phase was helpful, and we were able to resolve the major issues as the process progressed.
ACT! CRM is more cost effective than like a Salesforce, but that is for a reason, it lacks a lot of the functionality that a Salesforce has. Pipedrive is actually another cost effective platform I've been evaluating as a potential ACT! CRM replacement. I like it's modern day look and feel versus ACT!.
These other products are not fully focused on sales. Of course you can create a workflow for your employees but they have too much info that youll probably won't end Up using. Also their AI assistance is not that accurate when you need some advice or personalized Insights. That's why we swapped to another software that was focused on the sales funnel.
1. It much needed to the end-user like sales person and marketing team to read the real time analysis for better decision making and deal closing. 2. Cost calculation and tracking becomes easier on go. 3. HR department, sales and marketing teams are getting insights for further improvement of the process of sales and conversion rate. 4. Easier to know customer behavior and taste.
