SharpSpring was a full-funnel marketing and sales automation platform that united marketing and sales teams to launch and track targeted campaigns and personalize every interaction to engage and convert more customers and drive revenue. It was acquired by Constant Contact and sold for a time as simply Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM, or SharpSpring by Constant Contact. This product, and the former SharpSpring have since been discontinued, and are no longer sold apart from
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Nutshell
Score 8.9 out of 10
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Nutshell offers a CRM with contact management, calendar sync, click-to-call, and collaboration features.
Nutshell was a lot easier to use right out of the box but lacked the automation infrastructure. SharpSpring came in and saved us loads of time and headaches (after the initial headache of learning to use it).
We experienced working with other platforms in our team, reviewing and testing, in order to find the one that would optimize our workflows the most. Some of these were completely new to me (Sharpspring was one of them), but I had previous experiences with platforms like Mailchim…
SharpSpring is great for creating and tracking campaigns that span multiple channels. With the Salesforce integration, we are able to keep our Sales team focused inside Salesforce without them needing to learn a new tool. Our Marketing team uses SharpSpring to nurture leads before handing them off to the Sales team. Though the features are available, SharpSpring would not be suitable for social media management or blogs; our third-party tools do a better job at that.
This can be used for different industries, healthcare, IT, retail or any company with a customer service line, big or small. if i had to ask, i would say "Do you have any type of filing system that you use?" "anything where you are keeping track of personal/ business information." Do you need access to information on a day to day basis? If they do , then this can be used , especially if you need to keep track of the numbers; we like how we can see if are things going up or down.
Their Emailers are very easy to construct and user-friendly. It takes your Newsletter and sales emails to the next level, especially with the action groups and trigger functionalities.
The life of the lead functionality allows you to see when leads get warmer, so you know when to send them what. Helps improve conversions.
The landing page builder is a bit hard to use. Doesn’t have much flexibility.
Sometimes confusing between types of workflows to use. Opportunity versus visual.
If you imported contacts that weren’t formatted correctly. It is hard to delete a bull amount. Need to type DELETE for each one manually. No bull options to make changes.
We have been very impressed with all aspects of this software and the potential for it to radically change how we operate is huge! Support has been exceptional and we have discovered many extra uses for the software than originally thought. Not only will it give us benefits for our company's growth, but for our client's growth as well.
This is perfect for a small business / Home based business with SaaS. Nutshell constantly adds new features and the price is much better than more robust software like Salesforce.
This rating is coming from an administrative perspective. With so many features, workflows, dashboards, and more, there is certainly a lot going on, and even the most savvy software user can get a little overwhelmed when trying to decide how to best implement and utilize the platform to its full potential. That being said, the SharpSpring platform is well-implemented and well-organized, with most solutions being fairly intuitive, once you have a grasp of the software. It is fairly easy to learn, but difficult to master. Just like any powerful platform, however, the complexity is worth it, and once you are comfortable navigating and problem solving within SharpSpring, it becomes a great marketing and sales tool which can do virtually anything you need it to.
Extremely easy to use and they help you throughout the process. I find it not challenging, an effective utility to help us prioritize and engage efficiently at a reasonable price point. We enjoy working with the team there and they're easy to access. I've already recommended it to two colleagues
The support is great which really helps overcome challenges if you become stuck and the training videos are great too. Same-day replies are great and I even got some help with some CSS code on the chat. Not many organizations would do this or even respond.
Nutshell's support team has always been great and they tend to go above and beyond. They are polite, friendly, personable and great listeners. They are also great about sending follow up emails too.
Overall I would say to be patient and bring everyone who will be touching the platform to the onboarding sessions. The Virtual Classroom lets you onboard as quickly or slowly as you want. Sales, marketing, design, account management, get 'em all in on it. For the most part, they will be happy to use this platform. I recommend getting as many people as possible to see the SharpSpring demo.
We use different CRMs for different clients, mostly due to budget and other requirements. SharpSpring from Constant Contact is in the middle, price-wise, but is slightly more user-friendly than ActiveCampaign when it comes to certain things, such as drip campaigns and workflows. Though the price can be prohibitive to some clients, it is extremely robust. I definitely prefer the list-building, the ability to send smart emails and the WYSIWYG editor.
When I first started with BCI, they were using ACT!. It was hard to navigate and there were a lot of spots for duplicate information that made it hard to know if you were in the right spot or not. Then if you had trouble, you would spend 3 hours on the phone with customer service and often they would not even be able to find a solution. I would not recommend ACT! to anyone. Since getting nutshell, I have learned a bit about Cosential and I know that it is more catered to the construction industry and can help with proposal creation, so I think that may be something we consider in the not-too-near future.
Streamlined Processes - sales and marketing are now all in the same place.
Reduced Number of Platforms/Tools - CRM/lead management, email, automation, landing pages, forms, etc are all in the same place rather than using multiple tools.
Time-saving - sales pipeline is very easy to use for sales. For marketing, we have dozens of workflows that eliminate much of our manual processes from the past.
Return on Investment - We're more focused on moving the building the business than ever before because SharpSpring has simplified so many of our business operations and we're seeing massive results!
Lead generation - Up SIGNIFICANTLY (between 3x & 4x) since setting up SharpSpring.
Nutshell CRM has had a major impact on ROI. The last program we used cost more and had fewer features and accessibility.
One negative impact is its email functions. As stated before in this review I need to be able to send large attachments and pics through email and Nutshell is very limited when it comes to that.
