The best CRM for me

CRM is at the heart of the work of salespeople and representatives, so let’s look at the different options you have.

No CRM

Except in some businesses or stores, this is not a viable option for a serious salesperson. The best CRM allows you to :

• List your customers and prospects
• Follow up on them
• Intervene at the right time
• Keep a history of the relationship with this customer

A salesperson who speaks well but is not organized cannot succeed and will create complaints that will destroy his reputation and that of his company. CRM is necessary for any sales representative or sales organization.

The cardboard cards

The system is simple, but effective, it has been used for decades and some businesses still use it. I started like that and I grew my business!

On the other hand, the system has its drawbacks:

• You can only sort them by recall and follow-up, to find a customer you can’t find them alphabetically, the sales rep has to know his system perfectly to know where to find a customer file.
• If your files fall on the floor and the cards fall off, you lose almost everything!
• You can hardly take it with you on the road, and nowadays you have to feed your system in real time.
• The space on a card is limited, you have to write with a pencil and erase the old comments of visits
• We have just moved to another era, we have to live with the times!

An Excel table

An Excel spreadsheet allows you to fill in some of the gaps in the paper files: you can find customers according to the follow-up date, their name, or their category.  On the other hand, in my opinion, paper files are more flexible and intuitive to use.

Main limitations:

• Uncomfortable interface for a salesperson
• Lack of space on the lines
• Text can be inserted in some cells, but they are not made for that
• It’s good for big lists or calculations, but it’s just not a salesman tool. 
• A salesman who doesn’t work with a nice tool sells badly. 

Popular CRMs

We are talking about software such as 

• SalesForce : the most used
• Microsoft Dynamics: the biggest and most complex
• Oracle Netsuite
• Hubspot
• Sugar CRM
• Zoho CRM

These CRMs are found in all large companies, but ALL vendors complain about them:

• Too heavy
• Too complicated
• Too expensive compared to our salaries
• We spend more time entering information than selling
• Designed by computer scientists who don’t understand anything about the sales profession.
• You have to go through menus and sub-menus to note what you want
• You have to note each action to obtain statistics when it is not necessary
• Statistics are favored over sales
• The tool should be at our service and not the other way around.
• The tool prevents us from selling and focusing our energies

ActionClient

Of all the CRMs we studied, ActionClient is the only CRM designed by salespeople, for salespeople, intuitive, that helps with sales.

Here are the main advantages:

• Simple
• Intuitive
• Few interface screens, everything is done on the same page
• Floating navigation bar for quick navigation 
• Sales are favored over statistics: it is better to have sales than a lot of numbers to explain bad results.
• You will find the essentials: customers, prospects, current proposals, customer lists, uninteresting customers that you can try again later
• Importing customer lists is done very easily with an Excel page
• The paid version also gives access to bulk list imports as well as call scripts and matrices to create them yourself.
• The paid version is very accessible to any vendor
• The free version is 100% functional.

Try ActionClient, it’s free, you won’t believe it!