Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM vs. Leadfwd

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.

Incentivized

I think Inbox25 is a great fit for companies outgrowing lower-end, disconnected email marketing applications. Companies with a more formalized marketing organization that send a lot of emails (tens of thousands monthly or more) will be better served with a product like Inbox25 that is less complex, easier to use, and much more affordable (30% lower by our experience) from the larger marketing automation products on the market. Our company has 3 full-time marketing staff with over 100,000 contacts (with valid emails) that we target in various direct and drip email campaigns and Inbox25 fits our needs just fine. I suspect that we may outgrow the product eventually but I think it'll meet our needs just fine for many years to come.

Incentivized

• 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.

• SugarCRM integration
• Ease of building workflows
• Responsive, helpful support team

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Inbox25 is in a growth phase and has transformed their product pretty fast. With that comes an increased need to continually learn how to leverage new features.
• Tutorials and product documentation exist but it is relatively minimal. They overcome this with personalized, one-on-one training that is recorded for future review using a project management platform.
• Inbox25 has expanded beyond Sugar CRM to include Salesforce.com integration. I'm not sure if they plan to add integrations to other applications but they are positioned well for growth.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Different platforms stack up particularly well for different use cases. INBOX25 is our default choice for SugarCRM users.

Incentivized

• 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.

• We have successfully moved cold suspects to leads and leads to opportunities, and opportunities to customers with Inbox25. We are just now starting to realize more value given that we've only recently started using the more advanced drip marketing and lead scoring features.
• When we used the pay-as-you-go version we were paying just pennies per email and remained CAN-Spam Act compliant. It was harder to quantify the ROI then but it was apparent that email marketing was working and moving prospects from one sales stage to another. It was also very useful for re-engaging prospects and promoting products and services to customers.
• Our total investment in the advanced edition is less $30,000 annually and we expect the ROI to be less than one year. It could have been sooner if we'd have been more thoughtful in our initial implementation.

Incentivized