Close CRM vs. Outreach vs. Salesmate

Excellent software to increase sales and follow up with existing and new customers. Email and SMS handling are really easy for the sales team, managing leads is really great, and Close merges duplicate leads to help our Data Leads avoid repetitive and unnecessary calls. As mentioned in some comments before, must improve in reports, Close is not appropriate to handle or track agents' hours making it necessary to implement additional software to cover this area.

Incentivized

Outreach is outstanding for volume outreach, as it allows you to touch many prospects and accounts with limited time, while also storing data on historical interactions with prospects. It can be useful for SDR/BDR roles, as well as SMB and MM volume of sales pipe, but I don't think it would be nearly as useful for enterprise sales where more strategic and lower volume outreach is needed. I believe that incorporating more AI assistance with writing would make it a more useful tool for strategic sales.

Incentivized

Salesmate gives us everything we need as a small business, with a clear interface, and can adapt to any business. If I was being ultra picky, I would perhaps suggest the ability to remove or hide certain modules not applicable to our niche, e.g., we are a B2C business, so the company module is not really useable for us, but this is not a negative by any means.

• Email sequences. Create and send a sequence of emails until the sequence finishes or the contact replies to your email. You can also pause the sequence manually.
• Email sync. Syncs in real time with your email account, which is huge.
• Zapier integration. We've automated a lot of our pipeline management through the Zapier integration. This saves us soooo much time.

Incentivized

• Building sequences, using a omni channel approach.
• Detailed report of each team members activity (email, calling, socials etc.)
• Clear overview of prospect and account summary.
• Straight to the point menu navigation.
• Email outbox, very useful for analysing low hanging fruit.
• Good integration with other tools.

Incentivized

• For each client, it tracks emails, text messages, activities, files, calendar events, phone calls, to-do items.
• Customization is quite good -- you add fields you need. Like was discovery received, full payment, partial payment, etc. You can later run reports.
• Integration with other apps is good; I use QuickBooks and DocuSign.
• Customer service is very good.

• Make it so one can set the time at which the emails go out.
• Make it easier to set up my workflow.

Incentivized

• When sequencing, I need to mark multiple leads, and using the search bar, it will uncheck all the leads that were previously checked.
• Calls drop constantly.
• Syncing contacts and leads with SF is challenging. The buttons to synchronize with CRM are available when searching for a contact or lead, but you cannot sync it when viewing the lead or contact itself.

Incentivized

• The search feature can be buggy and does not allow for highlighted text to be typed on. You must clear the box or hit backspace before typing. The only app in my life that does this.
• The dashboard button is pointless if it still makes you choose between legacy or classic.

It's a strong tool that helps our sales development team manage a large number of qualified leads. The sequence framework ensures that every lead receives enough contact attempts that we have confidence that we're not abandoning our prospecting too early without the overhead of managing those activities manually.

Incentivized

Very happy with the customer service and the overall functionality of the program. With new features always being launched and discussed I'm looking fwd to growing with them

Incentivized

It's my favorite CRM to recommend to sales organizations. Robust Telephony options including a Power Dialer, SMS, and Voice Drop, are completely integrated into the CRM. The kicker is you can have "Unlimited" contacts where many platforms charge based on the number of users. This can make a huge difference in monthly billing.

Incentivized

Overall, Outreach is usable and scalable across team sizes. The only reason I give a nine and not a 10 is that there are improvements that can be made within the reporting feature. It is usable, but not everyone can easily self-learn the best practices. At times, it may require building 2-3 reports and then using a VLOOKUP in Excel to achieve the desired outcome.

Incentivized

It's so easy, and the support is top notch and I love Salesmate. Seriously the best CRM on the market right now, which I was able to customize exactly the way I needed to, with their support with me every step of the way. I will be working with SalesMate for a long time if not forever.

In our years as Outreach customers, I can count the number of outages we've experienced on one hand. Generally, outages have been very brief and have not completely frozen our access to the platform. Scheduled maintenance is always proactive communicated and the hours never interfere with standard business hours or scheduled sequences.

Incentivized

Outreach's performance overall is very high quality. Pages load right away. Occasionally it might take a minute to generate a report, but not any slower than in other platforms I've used. Outreach is integrated into many of our other tools and seems to be a very clean integration. Everything runs very quickly.

Incentivized

I haven't really had the need to use their support, but the only time I had an issue with the platform, the Close team was very attentive and responded in a short span of time. Also they take minimal time to solve issues. The only con here is there is no way to reach out to them apart from email.

Incentivized

There is almost zero customer support. What they do offer is a live chat feature which is active during "normal" business hours which is nice for instant inquiries if someone is available. However, you do not have a dedicated representative to address questions or concerns and their billing process is confusing and messy without any support.

Incentivized

The support team at Salesmate is top-notch. They provide live chat support within the platform and answer typically in under a minute. They are always incredibly quick to respond to questions and provide insightful information. Getting started on the platform is easy as you always have support nearby.

We were trained in person and it was very easy to understand. And if we missed any pointers there was more training given to us. So i always like this tool. The drafts were also prepared for us to sync outreach with our devices so it was straightforward. Highly recommend

Incentivized

Lots of attention from the Outreach training team, with a great willingness to customize to our needs. To be clear, you get out what you put in. If you don't work with them, you'll get cookie-cutter training. But we asked for a lot of customization, and they delivered what we asked for.

I expected more assistance in connecting Outreach with Salesforce. We have a basic connection, but many fields were left without a sync. We can apparently sync data without adding the app into Salesforce, but believe we could get more functionality with a better integration. The basics of setting up our sequences and using Outreac to run them was was fine.

Incentivized

No - All very straightforward and simple.

Pipedrive was great for us for a long time. We used it for over 4 years. Our product and process was simple. When things got more complex, we needed something that could handle our growing needs and Pipedrive kept falling short. We built our own custom solution in Airtable and though it worked, we spend a lot of time managing it. Close was able to solve all our issues and save us hours per week in admin work.

Incentivized

Outreach is designed with a workflow-first approach, which helps ensure that reps adopt the process and allows AI and machine learning to understand the full funnel. On top of this, Outreach offers more robust functionality, reporting, and integrations than other competitors. Outreach also understands user workflows, which helps influence rep behavior and outcomes.

Incentivized

Very similar in overall layout and user experience...but the features blow these others out of the water. Where alternative solutions had features either lacking or as an upgrade (ie having to spend an extra $10-$30/month/user) Salesmate has these features out-of-the-box

When I first joined the company we were a sales team of 10. Over the last 4 years we have grown to 30 and have used Outreach the entire time. Everyone uses Outreach and it works for virtually any size business. The seat model works perfectly for any size company plus Outreach can handle hundreds of thousands of emails being sent out. We never have to worry about throttling or any type of lag time based on usage. This is key when scaling.

Incentivized

• Positive - It's much easier now with Close.io to make sure that no deal falls through the cracks. Therefore helping us recover lost revenue.

Incentivized

• It's helped me speed up my ability to reach out to customers. I like bulk composing but would be even better if Outreach was able to recommend (daily/weekly/etc.) who we should reach out to based on intent/other metrics.
• I will say outreach has improved our ability to book more meetings simply because it enables volume activities.

Incentivized

• It saved me so much time following up with leads. I move them to the next stage, and Salesmate does the rest.
• It does a whole load of outreach for me. It's seamless.
• I get a lot more responses from people in my pipeline - especially using SMS to follow up.