Close CRM vs. InsideSales.com / XANT PowerDialer for Salesforce (discontinued)

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

Outbound dialing is where it excels. It's especially good with larger teams of reps. Organizing through campaigns and seek lists is very powerful once you understand how to use it. There is definitely a learning curve with seek lists (I've spent tons of time on the phone with their support staff) but once you understand it the possibilities are endless. You can sort which leads show up by a variety of filters. Even with a list of 10,000+ leads and 5 reps calling on it, you can ensure no leads show up in two reps lists, the reps are calling specific territories, and even skipping leads that are likely on their lunch break! One my of favorite tricks with seek lists and only calling people with titles like Director/VP/C-Level before 8:30am or after 5pm their time, when those people are more willing to pick up the phone. They also appreciate a sales rep who is putting in the extra time to call during those blocks.

Incentivized

• 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

• Organizes your leads based on the parameters you set so you call the hottest leads first.
• Connects with your phone so you can dial from your computer without having to enter the numbers every time.
• It also allows you to record the notes from the call right there and they get added to the completed task in Salesforce.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• No call parking features for inbound calls, if on a call through the dialer, one cannot place that call on hold to take the second call.
• All notes are lost when another inbound call comes in, whether or not you accept that call.

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

I like that it is simple, functional and I can rely on it to help me get my work done everyday. My job became much harder without InsideSales.com. The new CRM I am using has confusing features and too much going on sometimes. There are so many fields and functions that I find unnecessary--what sucks is when I look at my screen at all these empty fields, it makes me feel incomplete. With InsideSales.com, I knew what to put in every box and why it would be important. I could put it in once and whether it was my manager, case admin or data analyst or me, we all knew where to find it. With our new system, I find myself having to do more input and data entry for other people to benefit--no longer a "one shot, one kill" deal.

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

They are providing good support. We can contact any time to raise our query.

Incentivized

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

I am actually not on the decision making side, but we used PowerDialer because of the easy to use integration with our CRM with Salesforce. Having these two tools in tandem was a great platform for us to do prospecting.

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

• Improved Connect Rates - Knowing when our team has the highest chance of success has helped us optimize our call blocks, leading to an improved connect rate.
• Dials - With dialer lists and click to call functionality, we are able to make more dials to the right people.
• Rep achievement - Though harder to quantify, the gamification has focused the team around the right KPIs.

Incentivized