Great CRM tool for managing prospect info and leads
March 08, 2019
Great CRM tool for managing prospect info and leads
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Professional
Overall Satisfaction with Zendesk Sell (formerly Base)
We use Zendesk Sell in some areas of our organization to manage leads and prospects, especially students who may be interested in attending our university. Zendesk Sell was designed to help businesses like our university to meet the overall goals of customer relationship management. Zendesk Sell is highly scalable and customizable, allowing us to gain actionable customer insights with a back-end analytical engine, view business opportunities with predictive analytics, streamline operations and personalize customer service based on the student's known history and prior interactions with our university.
- We can easily keep our sales team focused on the highest value leads and deals across automated account rules informed by full-funnel analytics. I like that platform and everything that comes with it.
- This CRM has most of everything we need, with the exception of a few features. Emailing within Base, tracking emails, leaving notes, setting appointments, importing and exporting are all key features that are easy to learn, use, and teach to new sales staff. I have used products in the past including pipe drive and hub spot CRM, and Base has so far been my favorite. We really like the new look and feel that they recently rolled out, and it has made sales management even easier than it was before. Very happy with most all the features.
- Base has made it easy for our enrollment team to streamline communication with our target audience and to effectively organize them in stages, saving us a lot of time with our students. The ease of calling, texting, emailing, and updating notes from one "contact page" has truly revolutionized our process so that if used effectively, we can map out where each client is at each step of the process. Managers now have had an easy time viewing my team's progress and tracking our deliverables.
- With this platform, we can use all tools which will help the university control prospects and leads. We have everything we need to succeed. I contact across smart tools for emailing, calling and much more. It is very intuitive and with little training, our new staff members can pick it up easily.
- A problem with Base is that they haven't improved it much. There are little things they should be able to fix right away, like having a field for a lead's phone extension. That's right, if you have a number and an extension, there's no place to enter the extension!
- There are a few places here and there in the Base CRM that are missing small features - for example, there's currently no "Previous Lead" or "Next Lead" button on each lead page, you just have to go back to your lead list (similar to Salesforce). That said, none of these little features have slowed me down any, and they are extremely receptive to feature feedbacks and requests - based on their responses I'm confident that this CRM is just going to continue getting better as they continue adjusting to client feedback and ideas.
- I wish there was the ability to tag people in deals. When working collaboratively with another member of the sales staff, it would be nice to have the ability to tag them inside the deal to draw their attention to something or remind them of a task without having to utilize our external team communication platform.
- I wish there was an easier way to add photos to your contacts. It can pick a photo up if you have some social media information, but I have found the process cumbersome.
- Zendesk Sell streamlined our enrollment coordination. We like having one place for all leads, contacts, and deals and the ability to convert them when they are ready. Now we are able to very easily pull up reports and filter them according to timeline, student rep, date range, etc. and see in-depth reports. We like being able to measure our success and make changes and learn from our mistakes as well. This has definitely streamlined our process.
- Zendesk Sell has allowed more fluidity into our workday and it saves our team a lot of time. Enabling us to save specific templates, create call lists, and email specific groups allows us to devote more of our time to the actual conversation with the client, and creates a more authentic partnership between us and them.
- Having a transparent work flow, especially when it comes to sales, allows us to have productive and positive interactions with our students and to work well as a team in that people can jump into the recruitment process and see what has been done/said in the past, we can easily transition when employees join/leave, etc.
Zendesk Sell is not as robust as other leading CRM tools I have used in the past like Salesforce. Salesforce is the market leader and is always leading the way in innovation. Salesforce objects management is better simpler and allows the user to customize different screens and have different dashboards for reporting reasons. This is definitely a good alternative to Salesforce especially if you are currently using any other Zendesk products like Zendesk support.