CRM software is a marketer thing – or is it? This common misconception is two things: not true and hurting your business. That being said, not all CRM solutions are equally useful to your sales reps as they are to your marketing teams. So we compiled a list of the best CRM for sales to help you make informed decisions that will help you make your customers, sales teams and marketing one big happy family.

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Sales CRM software helps streamline pipeline management, store databases of customer information, manage opportunities and, of course, drive more sales. It enables you to manage all the different customer touchpoints throughout the process.

Best CRM Software for Sales

Here is the list of best CRM software for sales teams, according to our research:

Zoho CRM

Designed for businesses of all sizes, Zoho CRM is an integrated, cloud-based CRM platform that helps maximize productivity and manage customer relationships. It offers omnichannel support through email, social media, phone, live chat and in-person meetings. Its capabilities include AI-powered sales interpretations, solutions and predictions, process management, workflow automation, lead management, a developer platform and more.

Deal Dashboards in Zoho CRM. Source

Highest Rated Modules According to Our Data

• Opportunities/Deals Management — 100
• Products Management — 100
• Social Engagement — 100
• Team Collaboration — 100
• Workflows and Process Automation — 100

Top Benefits

• Manage Accounts Efficiently: Store profile information in an organized way so that you can access account details, opportunities, notes, tickets, communication history and more. Check information about a child account directly from a parent account page with the account hierarchy feature.
• Work With Real-Time Data: Get valuable insights on sales data and team performance through prebuilt dashboards. Zoho’s analytics helps keep track of KPIs, filter reports and provide data visibility to your whole organization.
• Optimize Sales Performance: The platform detects and predicts anomalies and offers real-time sales coaching insights using AI. You can define objectives, set KPI-based targets and visualize the scope of achievement, create targeted sales campaigns, and more.
• Boost Automation and AI: The system enables teams to save time by automating routine, time-consuming tasks so they can focus on more complex activities. AI-assistant Zia kicks it up a notch and improves data accuracy, sentiment analysis and lead prediction scores.
• Improve Mobile Access: Sales reps can use Zoho’s iOS and Android apps to access and update information anywhere and work on the go. Manage records offline, use card scanners and optimize in-person meetings with geo-location.

Primary Features

• Sales Campaigns: Create campaigns by manually entering data or bulk importing projects into the CRM. You can merge related sales campaigns under a parent campaign for easier organization. Associate campaigns with other tasks, events, contacts and deals and track statistics to determine their effectiveness.
• AI-Based Sales Recommendation: Provide your prospects and clients with cross-sell, upsell, retention and renewal opportunities at the right time. AI self-learning tool, Zia, analyzes customer data like behavioral patterns, interests and purchase details to recommend products.
• Sales Forecasting: Gain insight into individual and team performance and compare the current quarter’s sales to the previous one. You can use reports and dashboards to visualize targets and filter forecasts by sales rep, team or territory.
• Lead Scoring: Assign scores to leads based on demographics and behaviors. The system lets you define scoring rules and allot positive or negative points based on email engagement, survey responses and social media interactions.
• Journey Designer: Build customer journeys by tying together different processes and third-party apps. You can personalize, automate and evaluate customer experiences and identify possible bottlenecks.

Limitations

• The user interface can be hard to navigate.
• Zoho’s customer support and inquiry resolution aren’t very responsive.
• Automation is limited to the enterprise version.

Features Not Fully Supported According to Our Data

• Automatic Creation of Orders — Not Supported
• Order Segmentation — Not Supported
• Email Verification and Suggestion — Supported With Integrations
• Organization Charts — Supported With Integrations
• Document Conversion — Not Supported

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Salesforce Sales Cloud

Salesforce Sales Cloud, an on-demand sales CRM software, caters to small, midsize and enterprise organizations, helping improve sales and customer relationships. Its capabilities include lead and contact management, sales opportunity management, marketing automation, and customizable dashboard and reports.

You can monitor marketing campaigns, track sales leads, create and measure goals, offer after-sales service, and manage customer accounts.

Salesforce Sales Cloud’s Activity Management Dashboard. Source

Highest Rated Modules According to Our Data

• Workflows and Process Automation — 100
• Dashboards and Reports — 97
• Quotes, Orders and Contracts Management — 96
• Products Management — 96
• Team Collaboration — 92

Top Benefits

• Optimize Territory Management: By setting up a territory hierarchy, you can see a visual representation of parent-child relationships between territories. It’s possible to set up rules based on country, state and product lines and assign an unlimited number of sales reps to a territory.
• Enhance Call Management: Manage calls efficiently through upcoming call reminders, phone call scheduling and custom tagging, which helps you identify and categorize call types.
• Integrate With Multiple Apps: This CRM for sales unifies with multiple business tools and ensures a seamless information flow. It integrates with ERP systems, CMS, eCommerce platforms, accounting tools, ITSM products and social media channels.
• Improve Processes With AI: You can use AI sales cloud Einstein to analyze historical data, make future predictions and take informed decisions. AI chatbots help respond to customer queries, saving service agents’ time and resources.
• Deliver Personalized Interactions: Salesforce Engage tool and real-time alerts enable you to connect with customers in relevant ways. Sales reps can look at prospect history to navigate conversations with context. Mobile apps and campaign templates take it one step further, allowing you to customize communication with ease.

Primary Features

• Contact Management: Associate contacts with accounts and opportunities to get a deal overview. You can share documents and view customer details like activity history and internal account discussions.
• Automatic Lead Distribution: Define assignment rules that automatically assign leads to relevant sales reps. The system lets you set up pre-defined criteria based on geography, department or other specializations.
• Goals Management: This feature helps you define objectives and track progress against goals. Set up sales target quotas, add them to individual user records and measure overall performance.
• Customizable Reports and Dashboards: Create customizable reports and dashboards with charts, tables and other metrics using a visual drag-and-drop editor. This helps you analyze data properly and apply filters.
• Sales Pipeline: This feature lets you create multiple sales pipelines, customize views and import pipelines from other CRMs. You can organize opportunities in a Kanban board and view all of them at a central place across all stages.

Limitations

• The system can be slow to load and tough to navigate without adequate training.
• It doesn’t provide native integration with email clients like Gmail or Outlook and requires another Salesforce product to gain this capability.
• The platform doesn’t offer native prebuilt email templates. Templates require adding the Salesforce Productivity product.

Features Not Fully Supported According to Our Data

• Group Appointment Scheduling — Not Supported
• Email Verification and Suggestion — Supported With Integrations
• LinkedIn Prospects Capture — Supported With Custom Development
• Contacts Map — Supported With Integrations
• Geotagging — Supported With Integrations

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Dynamics 365 for Sales

Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 for Sales offers integrated solutions that help you drive sales, improve operations and ROI, track leads and more. Notable features include customer relationship management, project service automation and management, sales forecasting, financial tracking and more. The platform is available on iOS and Android, as well as offline, enabling users to work without data connectivity.

Business performance in Microsoft Dynamics 365. Source

Highest Rated Modules According to Our Data

• Workflows and Process Automation — 100
• Dashboards and Reports — 98
• Opportunities/Deals Management — 95
• Documents Management — 91
• Products Management — 90

Top Benefits

• Manage Calls Better: Automatic and manual call logging ensures you can map the calls to existing or new leads. Get notified about upcoming and missed calls, schedule phone calls, and view call schedules at a glance.
• Optimize Email Activities: Standard email configuration, as well as important integrations like Gmail and Outlook, help you send and receive emails, associate emails with respective contact records, share quotes, add follow-ups, and make notes. Send individual and personalized emails to campaign members, use prebuilt email templates or create templates from scratch to send mass emails.
• Get Language and Currency Support: You can set the default currency, define exchange rates and generate invoices for international clients in their preferred currencies. The platform also offers multiple languages to choose from for the user interface.
• Enjoy AI-Driven Insights: Ensure personalized customer experiences with a 360-degree view, maximize customer lifetime value, automate workflows and make informed business decisions using AI. Sales reps can react to risks and opportunities promptly with adaptive AI that senses changes in buyer needs and trends.
• Improve Customer Relationships: Get recommendations on how to move sales forward based on customer interaction data, profiles and insights, and ways to secure a warm introduction. You can personalize sales documents using embedded Office 365 tools and improve sales engagement by combining customer data with survey insights from Microsoft Forms Pro.

Primary Features

• AI-Based Coaching Actions: Use AI to improve sales insights and prioritize leads and opportunities that are most likely to convert. The solution provides actionable feedback and the next best actions. You can track and analyze pipeline changes using deal flow visualization.
• Accounts and Contacts Management: Create, edit and get a unified view of contacts along with opportunities, deals and history. Manually add contacts or import them from other systems. You can also associate multiple contacts with one account.
• User Homepage: This feature displays a customizable summary view of details such as assigned tasks, opportunities, gadgets, leads, activities, visualizations and more. You can use prebuilt dashboard views and lists to get team performance insights.
• Leads Capture: Capture leads from various sources like website inquiries, mailing lists, campaigns and business card scans. Collect information about contacts and companies from a LinkedIn search, and pull the data into the system.
• Activity Management: Get a quick view and track all activities like calls, appointments, tasks and emails. The system shows who created which activity and automatically timestamps them.

Limitations

• Current connector apps such as Mailchimp and DocuSign don’t work as expected.
• Multiple windows and tabs may confuse new users.
• Too many session breaks may disturb workflow.

Features Not Fully Supported According to Our Data

• Email Verification and Suggestion — Supported With Integrations
• Contract Management — Supported With Integrations
• Automatic Creation of Orders — Not Supported
• Order Segmentation — Not Supported
• AI-Based Anomaly Detector — Not Supported

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Creatio

One of the best sales CRM in the market, Creatio simplifies marketing, sales and service efforts for seamless operations. It offers mobile access for Android and iOS devices so you can update and add contacts, make calls, and send SMS messages. Key features include contact and lead management, pipelines, dashboards, analytics, and opportunity management.

Accounts Tab in Creatio. Source

Highest Rated Modules According to Our Data

• Quotes, Orders and Contracts Management — 100
• Team Collaboration — 100
• Workflows and Process Automation — 97
• Leads Management — 91
• Products Management — 90

Top Benefits

• Evaluate Sales Efficiency: You can use forecasting to filter and compare sales indicators across time periods. The system monitors how effectively sales reps meet their sales quotas and targets.
• Track Website Behavior: Creatio lets you track and identify lead generation channels. Monitor marketing campaigns and view details like pages visited, time spent on the site and website paths.
• Manage Emails Better: Use email templates to deliver personalized communication to various segments. You can integrate with popular email service providers and track deliveries, open rates, spam and unsubscribers with bulk email analytics.
• Improve Communication: Group customers according to industry, revenue, priority or based on their choice. Dynamic segments let you filter all accounts you haven’t contacted for over a month.
• Save Time: The system automates various business activities and reduces sales teams’ workload. You can use a drag-and-drop case designer and reference processes to modify and create new automated internal processes.

Primary Features

• Account Management: Get a 360-degree customer view and access all contacts and accounts from a single database. You can create contact records, view interaction histories and see contacts on a map.
• Customizable Reports and Dashboards: Track current KPIs and get a complete picture of team performance with real-time reports. The system lets you visualize statistics through charts and lists using drag-and-drop tools.
• AI in Lead Conversion: The “predictive score” feature lets you assess the probability of successful lead conversions on a scale of 1 to 100. Generate sales insights and identify which deals are likely to get stuck in the pipeline.
• Order Generation: Create orders with ready-to-use templates and invoice clients from a single window. You can track order documents, communications, deliveries and payments.
• Target Management: The system lets you track day-to-day operations and overall performance to analyze employee productivity. Set individual, team or company sales targets and monitor important indicators like the average number of activities per day.

Limitations

• It doesn’t provide a built-in telephonic caller.
• Functionality can be slow and has a learning curve.

Features Not Fully Supported According to Our Data

• Email Verification and Suggestion — Not Supported
• AI in Lead Management — Supported With Custom Development
• AI-Based Anomaly Detector — Supported With Custom Development
• Account Hierarchy — Supported With Integrations
• API Usage Dashboard — Supported With Custom Development

Compare CRM Pricing & Costs with our Pricing Guide

SAP Sales Cloud

SAP Sales Cloud helps streamline different processes, including contracts, billing, lead management, invoicing, forecasting and more. You can automate order management and revenue recognition processes, get visibility into sales performance, configure role-based access permissions and more.

The platform stores contacts in a centralized repository, integrates with Microsoft Outlook and offers support through live chat, documentation, phone, video tutorials, forum and other modes.

Team Forecast on SAP Sales Cloud.

Highest Rated Modules According to Our Data

• Team Collaboration — 100
• Opportunities/Deals Management — 98
• Quotes, Orders and Contracts Management — 89
• Dashboards and Reports — 87
• Leads Management — 86

Top Benefits

• Improve Territory Management: Set up a territory hierarchy with multiple levels to check a visual representation of parent-child relationships, create rule-based territories and assign accounts to those. You can either assign multiple sales reps to a territory or several territories to a salesperson.
• Integrate With SMS Systems: Get insights into text message performance and recognize templates with higher customer responses. You can reach prospects and customers through personalized SMS using CRM data and text message templates to reuse.
• Manage Documents Efficiently: Store attachments and documents in a centralized repository to ensure role-based access. You can share files with internal and external users by generating an encrypted link and sending it through email or chat. It’s also possible to attach files to various CRM records like leads, accounts, contacts, deals and products.
• Enhance Lead Management: Manage leads at every stage by gathering insights on sales activities, identifying promising leads through prediction scores and recognizing leads stuck in the pipeline. Assign leads to sales reps automatically by defining rules. You can capture leads from various sources and add them to a single database.
• Easily Handle Contracts: The solution allows you to create contracts manually or use templates by auto-populating necessary fields. Manage contracts, associated specifications and additional agreements. You can attach electronic versions and photocopies of contracts and keep track of contract details and amendments history.

Primary Features

• Appointment Scheduling: You can use the calendar to see your customer’s schedules and colleagues’ appointments. Define visiting hours for an account and request clients to select a time and date within those hours.
• Charts and Visualizations: Use interactive charts and dashboards to visualize large quantities of data. The system offers multiple options like bar graphs, tables, columns, pie charts and heat maps.
• Lead Scoring: SAP Sales Cloud has multiple lead scoring tools like survey scores and engagement scores that help better understand leads. You can use the deal finder to rank incoming leads based on their likeliness to convert and engage with leads in that order.
• Opportunity Management: Use standard statuses or create custom statuses to identify where opportunities are in the pipeline. The system has sales cycles and phases where you need to perform specific activities between an opportunity’s start and close dates.
• Quote Generation: You can generate quotes by including information about customers and products from an opportunity. Create follow-up activities like emails, calls and appointments directly from the sales quote.

Limitations

• It lacks basic integrations such as campaign tools, LinkedIn, Outlook and more.
• The support team isn’t very responsive.
• The mobile app doesn’t have a user-friendly interface.

Features Not Fully Supported According to Our Data

• AI-Based Sales Recommendation — Not Supported
• Group Appointment Scheduling — Not Supported
• Custom Portals — Not Supported
• Contacts Recommendation — Not Supported
• AI-Based Coaching Actions — Not Supported

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How We Choose Products

Our team of writers and analysts at SelectHub is committed to giving you the best recommendations based on our data. To make our list, products had to meet two criteria:

1. Closely match the topic
2. Earn a top-5 analyst score in our selection platform

Our analyst scores are based on an in-depth research process using primary and secondary sources. This includes SelectHub Analyst Briefings, direct communication with vendors, and reviewing materials such as user reviews, product brochures, specification sheets, case studies, user manuals, and technical documentation.

Our platform’s Scoring Engine processes the research and computes the analyst score. The score also factors in platform settings such as industry and company size.

Learn more about our research methodology and editorial standards

Primary Benefits

CRM sales software can improve your sales cycles with a wide range of benefits like:

• Safe Storage: Sales reps can store information about opportunities, activities, contacts and scheduled plans securely in a central database and access it whenever they need.
• Improved Targeting: A CRM for sales helps segment data and identify valuable opportunities so that the top leads are easy to target without wasting time on those less likely to convert.
• Quick Reports: The sales team can prepare weekly and monthly reports following transparent and automated processes in a short time span.
• Optimized Planning: CRM sales software helps prioritize tasks and optimize daily schedules, ensuring the sales team can contact prospects in a timely, effective way.
• Saved Time and Money: Automated business procedures save time, budget and resources. It allows sales agents to focus on more complex, core tasks as they won’t be juggling back and forth between multiple processes.
• Thorough Data Analysis: Without dedicated sales CRM software, it might be very difficult to analyze performance issues – think of all the manual and repetitive efforts with Excel sheets! A smart CRM for sales analyzes data thoroughly, offers real-time insights based on customer behavior, identifies bottlenecks and tells you how the sales department is performing.
• Shorter Sales Cycles: With automated admin processes and accurate data, your sales reps can have more time to connect with leads and nurture prospects. They can establish strong relationships in less time and move leads through pipeline stages quickly.
• Accurate Data: Replace those manual and error-prone processes with efficient automated processes and improve data accuracy. Get better data visibility by filtering the feed with chosen user type or activity. On top of that, if you’re using a platform equipped with data enrichment tools, it provides automatically populated data about leads, reducing research time and the potential for errors.
• Centralized Operations: Right from handling cold calls and pipelines to managing field sales and prospects, a sales rep’s day is hectic enough. Sales CRM software acts as a perfect centralized system to manage daily operations seamlessly. Integration with the existing channels and communication tools makes it easier to manage accounts.

Key Features

Before investing in a CRM for sales teams, these are the basic features that you must look for:

• Sales Automation: This helps search through information across different channels and streamline the workflow. You can eliminate manual data entry using sales inventory, plan the schedule of busy periods well in advance and ensure best practices using performance tracking tools.
• Account Management: CRM sales software lets you check all client information, including their activities, payment status, pending deals and more, at a centralized repository.
• Lead Management: With this feature, you can keep track of sales reps’ performance and check their interactions with prospects and existing customers. You can monitor the position of leads in the sales cycles by gathering information from different sources. This visibility helps you nurture leads using relevant and personalized information.
• Quotation Management: You can generate quotes quickly and keep track of the existing ones. This feature lets you forecast sales, refine the sales funnel by segmenting customers and address the operational needs of your business.
• Opportunity Management: Identify the potential sales opportunities as soon as they develop, and respond to those instantly. It’s equipped with proposal management tools that help you track contracts, letters, quotes, messages and projects.
• Dashboards and Reports: Use forecasting and analytics to predict sales conversions and monitor behavioral trends. The system provides insight into deals, emails, calls and other sales activities. You can visualize data with charts, lists, tables and funnels and use them to make informed decisions.

Other key things to look out for — multiple sales pipelines, reminders, shared calendars, mobile accessibility and tracking capabilities.

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Next Steps

Every CRM for sales offers different modules and features, but these consistently perform well for the features that sales teams need. If you’re still not sure, make sure to check out our CRM comparison matrix and our sales force automation report to get a better idea of where these platforms stand in relation to the others on the market.

What features and functions are most important to your sales team? Do you agree with our choices? Give us your thoughts in the comments!