SharpSpring is far superior to Act_On, HubSpot, & Infusionsoft.
May 22, 2015

SharpSpring is far superior to Act_On, HubSpot, & Infusionsoft.

Perryn Olson, CPSM, CCMP | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review

Overall Satisfaction with SharpSpring

We utilize SharpSpring as our CRM and marketing automation tool as well as suggest our clients utilize its resources. Our business development and marketing team members use the system daily from moving prospective clients down the funnel to sending out email blasts and automated messages. It saves us time by identifying prospects when they're ready to buy through lead scoring; shows what marketing efforts are working with their metrics, and identifies website visitors for our business development team.
  • Lead scoring - know who to reach out to first because they're ready to buy, otherwise you have to randomly pick or guess who to contact out of the thousands of names in your CRM.
  • Website Identification - See what companies are on your website and what they're looking at, then reach out to them to pinpoint who is the actual point person.
  • Marketing Automation - the "easy button" in marketing. Automatically follow up with people that fill out forms, you meet at conferences, or prospects that have gone cold to nurture them into being ready to purchase from you.
  • Metrics - See what works in real time, both in contacts generated, opportunities created, and dollars closed. SharpSpring also includes offline metrics like direct mail and conferences.
  • CRM - I'd like to see the CRM have a unified company feature instead of everything being tied to individual contacts. Their development team said this is in the works.
  • Mobile app - not here just yet
  • We close deals faster because the sales pipeline is easy to see by phases
  • Save time with automation - about 5-8 hours a week in saved emails, calls, and tracking
  • Call hot prospects instead of cold ones with the lead scoring - huge time savings!
  • Act-On,HubSpot,Infusionsoft
At first, we heavily researched Act-On, HubSpot, and Infusionsoft. Infusionsoft was fair, but not great in pricing or usability, it seems dated. HubSpot is great if you're learning how to do content marketing, but we already had that down for a few years and it required you to use their system as your website's backbone instead of WordPress, which we develop websites on. We choose Act-On because they had the tools we were looking for, but after a year it wasn't worth the money and the overall systems weren't integrated with each other. It took multiple steps to create the html for forms to add to your website and to create a lead scoring report. We switched to SharpSpring after a recommendation from another marketing firm and haven't looked back. SharpSpring bases their entire CRM on the lead score; the activity per prospect is easy to find, and everything feeds into the Pipeline and Metrics.
SharpSpring is an amazing resource for B2B brands with long sales cycles and luxury B2C companies, even ones with large sales teams. For marketing agencies, SharpSpring offers more tools and a better incentive for you compared to the other major players.

Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM Feature Ratings

WYSIWYG email editor
9
Dynamic content
9
Ability to test dynamic content
10
Landing pages
Not Rated
A/B testing
10
Mobile optimization
Not Rated
Email deliverability reporting
8
List management
9
Triggered drip sequences
10
Lead nurturing automation
10
Lead scoring and grading
10
Data quality management
10
Automated sales alerts and tasks
9
Calendaring
9
Event/webinar marketing
6
Social sharing and campaigns
Not Rated
Social profile integration
Not Rated
Dashboards
10
Standard reports
10
Custom reports
10
API
Not Rated
Role-based workflow & approvals
9
Customizability
10
Integration with Salesforce.com
Not Rated
Integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM
Not Rated
Integration with SugarCRM
Not Rated

SharpSpring Support

SharpSpring looks for alternative ways to do things and is willing to admit that the system doesn't do that, but they will add it to future phases.
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Immediate help available
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
None
Yes - Resolved within 2 days!
After not understanding the initial suggestion sent via email, I received a call from the support technical. Because I wasn't in the office, he made a screencast using my account and walked me through everything and offered his direct line if I needed him. Awesome!