Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM vs. Sellsy

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

We like sellsy. Its not perfect and as other users have pointed out, there is and always will be, room for improvement.

If you require deep integration with Google apps and Microsoft Office 365, then Sellsy may not be for you. Sellsy just about manages to work with google in so far that it can sync contacts, calendar, sales docs and incoming email with google. There is currently no way to make sent email appear in the sent items section of sellsy unless you compose the email within the sellsy app. The O365 integration is not nearly as powerful as sellsy does not sync sellsy contacts or calendar with microsoft (in its current form).

I believe that one of the primary functions of any business management app should be the capability to centrally manage all of a company's business clients, contacts etc. and sync this data to all employee accounts with the 2 biggest players for business email (Microsoft and Google) as a minimum. This data should never be an island stored only on 1 application. The Discovery that sellsy does not currently sync contacts and calendars with O365 was a disappointment. If Sellsy started supporting exchange sync for Microsoft Office 365 we would immediately dump google and switch over. In fact Sellsy is the only reason we continue to use Gapps as we need our contacts and calendars synced to our mobile devices.

We have built up a list of small little things that do not work as expected since we started using sellsy and continually pass them on to the development team. Many are small trivial things from an engineering perspective but are still annoying nonetheless, especially to users who wish to get the job done. Employees are easily frustrated if they have to fight with software to do certain tasks. Annoyances in the user experience (no matter how small) can lead to lost productivity which in turn costs money in the business world. However based on our experience with Sellsy support we believe that they do listen carefully to their customers concerns and are on the path to deliver a quality experience to their customers through the process of frequent updates to the software. You can easily establish how good a SAAS provider is by measuring their ability to fix problems soon after they are initially reported.

In simple terms Sellsy is an incredibly feature rich application and is way ahead of the competition. It represents good value for money and is backed up by free support.

• 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.

• Appealing Design
• Easy to prepare invoices and send them
• Good tracking system
• Friendly support staff

• 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

• Training. The only real issue I have with Sellsy is that its got so many features its hard to understand them all. I looked for training videos and they are all in French. Thats a big problem for a guy who grew up in NJ.
• I would embed training videos directly into the software. This way as you add services, you get a full tutorial immediately.

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

Sellsy ticks the most boxes for us. While it could still do a lot of things better there is no other single app that offers the same spectrum of features at a comparable price for SMEs.

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

There is room for improvement.

We have not yet experienced any down time with sellsy.

Sellsy is slow to load pages for us. Sometimes waiting a few seconds. This could be due to our geographical location.

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

Based on our experience. We have submitted a large amount of tickets and they have proven the Sellsy development team have the ability to respond fast and implement changes reasonably quickly. (Updated July 2015)
It took sellsy a number of weeks to solve an issue with the billable hours section of their application. This delayed us from being able to invoice our client for completed works. Lots of small things like email tracking timestamps have never been fixed even though we highlighted this issue months ago. Though small it is growing more and more frustrating to be reminded every time we try to see what time a client read or opened an email from us.

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

If you are importing data from a CSV, Sellsy recommends you use OpenOffice. OpenOffice is an absolute disaster on Windows 8 and crashes every few mins. While no fault of Sellsy they should not recommend software which makes an already challenging task even more difficult. A small gripe in hindsight but during the process was deeply frustrating. For any users looking to format your CSV Google, try importing CSV data into Excel and your life will be much more easy.

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

For me it is close to what Salesforce did. I do not use all the options they both offer so I mostly judge on the customer / contact tool.

The license model once you understand it is very flexible allowing you to select from the modules within sellsy. This gives small companies control of the cost facilitating them with the option to only pay for the features they use.

• 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.

• It helped us look and operate professionally even though we had started out of our homes. That's huge.