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8 Tools to Supplement Your CRM

Finding the right CRM for your business can take a lot of time and effort, so it’s important to ensure that you get a return on your investment.

Thankfully, there are a range of CRM add-ons and integrations on the market which are designed to help you to get the most out of your CRM. And it’s definitely worth checking these out, rather than launching ‘straight out of the box’.

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Whether you’re a small business owner or running a large scale enterprise, there’s a CRM integration out there that was made for you. To give you a headstart, I’ve put together 8 of the most popular CRM tools around at the moment.

1. Woopra (Analytics)

Woopra is a web analytics tool that is designed to help businesses to better understand their customers.

Using Woopra, your sales and support teams can monitor real-time user activity from directly within your CRM. Within seconds, you can find out how a user reached your site, where they went when they got there, what pages they viewed, what browser they used, what device they used, and what country/city they live in. Your team can even initiate a live chat with potential customers as they navigate your site.

Woopra creates unique profiles for each customer based on their behaviours and site activities, which are then used to produce a number of key reports such as funnel analytics, custom analytics, and more.

Find out more about Woopra here.

2. MailChimp (Email Marketing)

MailChimp is extremely easy to set-up and use and it’s one of the more well-known email marketing tools on the market.

MailChimp’s comprehensive free plan makes it perfect for small-medium businesses and newcomers to email marketing. The ‘free forever’ plan allows for up to 12,000 emails and 2,000 subscribers on a monthly basis, which is great for startups or businesses with a limited budget.

Premium and Pay-As-You-Go plans are also available for larger businesses who need more advanced features.

Find out more about MailChimp here.

3. Pardot (Email Marketing)

Whilst MailChimp is a great choice for SMEs, a larger business may need a more feature-rich marketing automation tool – and that’s where Pardot comes in. This email marketing tool is really best suited to businesses with a large email marketing list and it’s not ideal for smaller startups.

Pricing starts at $1000 per month for the standard package, and features include:

  • Prospect tracking

  • Lead nurturing and email marketing

  • Lead Scoring

  • ROI Reports

  • Real-time Alerts

  • Standard CRM Integration

Pardot is a subsidiary of Salesforce but also integrates with other CRMs such as Microsoft CRM, SugarCRM, and Netsuite.

Find out more about Pardot here.

4. Hootsuite (Social Media Management)

Hootsuite is a popular social media management tool that allows users to manage all of their social media accounts from one easy to use interface.

Hootsuite makes social media management much more efficient by allowing users to auto-schedule social media updates to share on multiple networks. It also offers some impressive reporting features but you may need to upgrade to a paid package to really get the most out of these. Hootsuite operates a freemium pricing structure, with paid plans starting at $10 per month.

Find out more about Hootsuite here.

5. Marketo (Engagement Marketing)

Marketo is a cloud based engagement marketing platform which offers tools such as email marketing, lead generation, and inbound marketing to help businesses to acquire new customers.

Marketo integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, NetSuite, Oracle and SugarCrm and Salesforce. The Salesforce integration is its best partnership though – with a real-time sync that refreshes every 5 minutes, making it even easier for users to build and automate their campaigns.

Marketo is best suited to medium companies and it’s strictly for B2B businesses only. There are 3 marketing automation packages available and pricing starts at $895.

Find out more about Marketo here.

6. Stripe (Payment Processing)

Stripe is an online payment processing system that allows merchants to take payments via their ecommerce sites.

It’s free to set up an account and you won’t have to jump through hoops to do it either. The fees are also pretty straight-forward with a flat fee of 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction.

Find out more about Stripe here.

7. PandaDoc (Document Sharing/Management)

PandaDoc is a nifty document sharing and management tool that allows users to send, track, negotiate, and sign documents online.

Using your CRM data, your team can quickly create and send documents to seal the deal on their latest sales within minutes. This freemium model allows 3 initial free documents for each user, which is topped up by a further 3 every time they refer a friend to the app.

Find out more about PandaDoc here.

8. Slack (Online Messaging App)

Slack is a popular online collaboration tool that’s become especially popular with the rise of remote-based employees. This online messaging app allows teams to communicate in real-time and makes it simple to upload and share files in one central place.

Other key features include public and private channels, third party integrations, and an indexed search.

Slack is a freemium service and it has more advanced features which can be accessed if you upgrade to a paid package, but to be honest – the free version has everything you need.

Find out more about Slack here.

What’s Your Go-To CRM Tool?

What tools do you use to get more out of your CRM system? Let us know what your go-to tools are in the comments below.