Salesforce Starter vs. Zendesk Sell

If you own a business that has complex selling processes or requires integrations with 3rd party tools/systems, you should look at Professional, Enterprise, or Unlimited editions. Salesforce operates very well across pretty much every industry, but not all sales, marketing, and operational processes are created equal. If your marketing process requires a long list of sendable contacts then I would recommend adding on Pardot or Hubspot. Always start small and scale up, to avoid boxing yourself in down the road.

Incentivized

Zendesk sell is best for organizations that want a clean and simple, yet powerfully effective CRM tool. It's intuitive, extremely user-friendly, supplies lots of video tutorials and access to the California team for FAQ's, and has all the features other, more complicated, expensive CRM's have. Great for institutions that have a need to tailor their database to fit your needs; and track sales, tasks, and pipeline projects in graphic form. It's affordable and has a great app for mobile phones that allows access to contacts, notes, tasks, and a workable platform while on the go in real time. It's simple to teach new users how to navigate and utilize. Adding or deleting users is simple, and access to the CRM information can be limited/private or made public for the entire team to access. Not as costly as some of the competing products, so if you are on a tight budget this may be the tool for you.

Incentivized

• Tracking phone calls is extremely easy when using the app on the iphone. After a phone call is complete it prompts the user to enter in call details.
• SalesforceIQ also automatically logs emails for us. This has saved us time from entering in information manually.
• SalesforceIQ was easy to set up and allowed us customization for fields that were relevant to our business.

Incentivized

• My favorite piece is the Tasks connected to the Clients OR the Deals themselves that keep the process moving with the right steps, and helps our team from doubling our work, or missing a piece that is crucial for the completion of the sale.
• The email integration helps to keep all things housed in one place also, so that you're not bouncing back and forth in multiple platforms to stay on top of the orders.
• Customizations are a HUGE part of why we use Base CRM right now. We can make sure we are recording all of the right information, and not wasting time by having to fill in or skip over content that doesn't apply to our business model.
• I also like the ability to tied Deals to multiple people, especially as Referrals come across, so we don't forget how we got in touch with different clients.

Incentivized

• Table views can be sorted by column. Filters can be applied, but only to one column. Multi-column filtering like Excel allows would be extremely useful and a big improvement.
• The ability to quick copy data in a table view would also be helpful, like (ctrl ') in excel.

Incentivized

• There was no ability to add prospects from a company domain or email to auto-fill any data.
• You had to type in all of the data you gathered about that prospect.
• The default only gave you two phone numbers for the company, too few.

Incentivized

The integration with the other Zendesk products is key. Allows other people in the company, such as support, to be involved in the sales process.

Incentivized

The system is very user-friendly on a desktop but lacks mobile friendliness. The Customer relationship manager disappears after the deal is signed. We struggled to get the system in a usable format, which was not cost-effective. The CRM system on desktop was great but way more complicated than it should be.

Incentivized

I received about two hours worth of training on Zendesk Sell (formerly Base CRM). I will say it's a clean look and the ability to change views is extremely helpful. I do wish there were other features that allowed the views to be more simplistic. Some views can be overwhelming to look at. Nevertheless with the minimum training, I am still able to navigate through Zendesk Sell (formerly Base CRM) successfully due to the ease of usability.

Incentivized

Always available and easy connection from Zendesk Support

Incentivized

Never any latency issues

Incentivized

Due to the ease of the product, I have not had the chance to reach out to support yet. I’ve had no reason. The resources provided to clients are extremely helpful and detailed. So far my questions have been pretty basic and I generally just ask my colleague or teammate. They're able to assist with the answer.

Incentivized

This product has a great backing of users, but needs more options direct from Base CRM on all operations of the software. YouTube videos do a great job of helping implement, and the back end support is a great help as well. The CRM is a great free option, and should be treated as such.

Incentivized

Simple, and straight forward.

Incentivized

more expensive but as an industry leader and go, the learning curve pays for itself in ROI in lost time in onboarding

Incentivized

Simpler than most CRMs, which can be good if your sales team is not very tech savvy. We switched to HubSpot which provides a lot more value than Base did, but it isn't right for everyone. HubSpot is focused on capturing in-bound leads and has its own flaws and limitations, but overall it's a better fit for our needs.

Always on, always available.

Incentivized

• It made the job more efficient for staff so they can spend time doing other tasks rather than configuring and maintaining Salesforce Starter.

Incentivized

• Using Base has allowed us to double the number of active sales and partner engagements that we can keep track of and make progress on.
• This has led to us being able to follow up on many smaller deals that were falling through the cracks.

Incentivized