Bigin by Zoho CRM vs. Shared Contacts for Gmail

Bigin by Zoho CRM is suitable for medium-size or small-size companies. In our case, being a small company, all the functions that Bigin by Zoho CRM offers are more than enough. If in the future we need features that are not currently covered by the platform, we will evaluate the possibility of migrating to Zoho CRM. But for the moment (until now we had never used a CRM), everything that Bigin by Zoho CRM offers us fits our needs perfectly. Perhaps for other very large companies, Bigin by Zoho CRM surely does not cover all needs, although I couldn't give examples.

Shared Contacts for Gmail is well suited for organizations that generate and coordinate long term partnerships and that have a big remote working component as a main form or working. It is less appropriate with organizations dedicated to sales and performance based ways of working. I would recommend it for medium size organizations.

Incentivized

• Bigin by Zoho CRM has embedded the marketing automation feature in its operations.
• Also, Bigin supports CRM, through social media engagement and other working platforms.
• Bigin provides the management team with customizable reports, after extensive analysis from the entire market segment.

Incentivized

• Helps manage contact lists and distribution lists.
• Eliminates the need for the use of an additional platform, like a CRM, to manage contacts.
• Makes it easier to share contacts with a targeted audience with the flexibility to be selective about who the data is being shared with.

• The CRM is majorly for small teams and does not have use cases for bigger organizations
• It needs to add some add-on features like email automation and journey creation from CRM itself.
• There is room for improvement in some specific use cases, like adding enrichment to leads manually or API integrated.

Incentivized

• I have been looking for a way to share our contacts within our organization for a while now. This process really improves how we were doing it within Google Sheets.
• My only negative is that it has taken so long for it to be functional within Google.

Incentivized

Because it is good.

It has some great functions that are very easy to use and user-friendly, however overall it is not a very robust system and the fact that it only does sales and not the rest of the cycle for an organization makes it very limiting. There are a lot of functions that are very basic, but for the price it does offer a lot of value for a smaller company that just needs basic functions to track.

Incentivized

The support is all international and it takes a while to get support as you have to go through chats and set up times, not as easy to just call and get the support you need. They are very nice when you do finally connect with someone and they are knowledgeable, just challenging being international sometimes.

Incentivized

The price is much more attractive than equivalent tools. Pipe drive is as good, but the cost is a big factor when you are a small company, especially at the beginning. So that is why we chose BIgin, and we are delighted with it. With five members, it saves a few hundreds of euros a year.

Incentivized

My company used Zendesk Sell for a while, but the profiles weren't as manageable and easy accessed as Shared Contacts [for Gmail.] It resulted easier to update the contact information within Shared Contacts [for Gmail] and maintain the contact flow, than updating in Zendesk, and then manually go into gmail and continue the conversation. As well we don't use Shared Contacts [for Gmail] alone. We do accompany it with an internal operations system, were we manage the clients profile, but the combination between the two is perfect.

Incentivized

• Reaching more possible customers quickly and with less effort. The fact of being able to automate sending to our contact database, which has previously been tagged and categorized, has allowed us to send information in a more agile way (previously we simply used Outlook, without any type of automation).
• Automatically consulting all the email history you have with any of the contacts has allowed us to be more efficient and avoid duplication in communications.
• The process of implementing and integrating Bigin in our company, although it was not difficult, we found some difficulties to synchronize the database loaded in Bigin by Zoho CRM with our Office365 account.

• More contact with clients
• Keeping track of contact information no matter the places
• Clients like the familiarity that is created by the constant check on them

Incentivized