Chapter 19

Top Ten Small Business Social CRM Vendors

CRM isn't only for the big dogs. Small- to mid-size businesses can also use it to manage, track, and build relationships with customers. This includes the social media world where, if used correctly, small businesses can cut costs on marketing and build a community of advocates for their brand.

This chapter is for the small business owners who need a detailed and concise solution to manage client interactions, lead generation, customer service, and social relationship management. When it comes to delivering the software, the companies you learn about in this chapter are at the top of their game. Their software can help staff at a small- and medium-sized company more deeply understand and engage customers.

Nimble

Nimble, whose website is shown in Figure 19-1, offers the small business solution that the world of social media and CRM has been waiting for. It helps you collect every piece of your online and offline relationships and store them in one place. With Nimble's social CRM software, you can send messages, add tasks, edit and download contact profiles, instantly find the social profiles of contacts, and view all activity — from e-mail messages to social conversations — with each contact. Nimble is one of those companies you just have to get to know.

Ken Hess, writer at ZDNet, said it best when be described Nimble in this way, “What makes Nimble different is that it is an all-inclusive workspace. It integrates your email, your CRM, your Sales Deals, your Contacts, and your Social Media connections in a single application.”

Figure 19-1: Nimble has a well-regarded social CRM solution for small business.

AddressTwo

Nick Carter — author, speaker and entrepreneur — started AddressTwo. It's a relatively unknown business based in Indianapolis, IN, but that doesn't keep it from being affordable and easy to use for the small business environment. And when we say easy to use, we mean it. While AddressTwo lacks the look and feel of the heavily funded CRM, it makes up for it in the easy layout and simple functions to get the job done. The software is perfect for individuals in the real estate, financial planning, or networking market.

Like most small business CRMs, AddressTwo costs about $10 to $15 per month.

Constant Contact

For those of you who don't know, Constant Contact is an ever-evolving e-mail marketing company that's making strides to build a complete engagement-marketing platform for small businesses, nonprofits, and member organizations. Constant Contact has a built a platform that gives the customer a robust set of tools to use in the social space.

The Constant Contact platform allows a business team to search, monitor, and connect with people across the web for business development, sales, and marketing purposes. With the Social CRM offering, Constant Contact also allows you to manage your marketing campaigns with social, mobile, local deals, events, and e-mail tools. With so many tools, the pricing is spread out over each offering. Check out their website for more information.

Zoho

Don't let the crayon-colored logo fool you. More than six million users work online with the social CRM Zoho. The software is a pretty straightforward, small-business CRM with capabilities such as calendar management, reporting, internal wikis, and document sharing. With Zoho, you can also create your own apps, which is a huge advantage for the more technically inclined user.

Zoho truly offers an entire suite of business-driven software products for smaller organizations. Zoho's tools include calendars, forms, e-mail, and invoices. Whether you're looking to automate processes, connect with your customers, or track your sales activities, Zoho manages to build and implement hardy web-based social CRM tools.

At the time of this writing, Zoho CRM is available at three pricing levels for customers. The enterprise level consists of the largest software offering and costs $25 per user per month. Zoho also offers a free version of the Zoho CRM for a business with less than three users. The professional plan fits somewhere in the middle, at $12 per month per user. The professional plan caters to the small business with 3–15 users.

Nutshell

Nutshell's solution is valuable if you're looking for a system to manage the strict details of the sales process within your small business. While companies like Constant Contact, Nimble, and Zoho manage almost every aspect of your communication and business, Nutshell allows companies to significantly impact, drive, and manage sales activities of different teams across the organization.

The Nutshell pricing model is similar to that of the other vendors on the list, starting at $10 per month for each user. The company also has invested in several high-availability data centers to guarantee that service is always operational, and they have a fully staffed technical support team.

Relenta

Relenta's tagline says it all: “CRM for people who get things done.” Relenta's software helps employees be more productive in their everyday work environment. The company is so enthralled with productivity that they implemented David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) principles within the software. Relenta helps small businesses view all activity with contacts and leads in a chronological order for a single client or prospect.

Relenta differentiates itself from the other solutions by emphasizing personal productivity. And when we say “emphasizing,” we mean “almost religious fervor around productivity.” The founder, Dmitri Eroshenko, even states in his bio that “Relenta is the result of my quest to take back my life.” He also states, “You can always email me directly, and rest assured that Relenta will not let me lose your email in the shuffle.”

Relenta offers a wide variety of pricing options for its customers, ranging from $25 to $250 per month. The differences in pricing depends on the number of users and contacts. Find more details at Relenta's website, shown in Figure 19-2.

Figure 19-2: Relenta is focused on productivity.

Batchbook

If you're a sole proprietor or small business owner with a staff of three or fewer, Batchbook may have the best solution for you. Batchbook has created a social CRM offering that includes social media monitoring, communications tracking, e-mail forwarding, to-do lists, web forms, and sales tracking. Like many other social CRM companies, Batchbook is integrated with many small business tools, including Formstack and MailChimp.

Batchbook creates useful and user-friendly software for small businesses. The team has a background in programming and web usability, which helps in the creation and build-out of the software solution. Overall, Batchbook is fairly competitive in pricing ranging from $14.95 per month per user to $149 per month for up to 50 users.

JitterJam

Thanks to Jason Falls from Social Media Explorer for turning us toward the Meltwater Group's product called JitterJam. This software offering is a little different from the rest of the products on this list because the company focuses solely on the marketing, PR, and advertising agencies who service the needs of consumer-facing companies. Basically, JitterJam supports the small business marketer and agency.

The tool allows your company to import contacts like Facebook fans and Twitter followers and move them into one large database (much like you can with Nimble's social CRM software). You also can tag the contacts in order to organize them in a neat and contacts-oriented fashion. Remember, filtering is a necessity when you're building a powerful CRM tool and solution. Although the website isn't clear about how much the product costs, you can easily sign up for a demo for the service.

BlueCamroo

BlueCamroo is one of the funkier social CRM software solutions on the list and not just because of its name. Although it's similar to JitterJam, BlueCamroo has a distinct marketing and positioning statement pertaining to social CRM and contact management. BlueCamroo tends to focus heavily on tracking web leads and web lead generation through visitors to your website. The software vendor believes that “every user visiting your website is a potential lead.” The product's feature list is a mile long and contains every aspect of the lead-nurturing process.

BlueCamroo focuses on the following tasks: time tracking, invoicing, social media scouting, e-mail marketing, work flow rules, and security around employee external and internal communication. BlueCamroo is also priced competitively, with several packages ranging from $29 per month per user to $199 per month for 10 users. The package includes storage space in the cloud and an unlimited amount of cases.

Infusionsoft

Infusionsoft's specialty is the small business that wants to combine CRM, marketing, and e-commerce all in one system. Infusionsoft combines CRM and digital marketing tools into a single online system that helps you automate and deliver valuable insights to your team.

The company tends to focus on three niche groups in the small business world: sales teams, service providers, and online marketers (with a focus on the e-commerce vertical). They allow you to find leads and shorten your sales cycle. One valuable upsell from Infusionsoft is that they allow you to spend more time with your customers because they automate many of the manual tasks keeping you in front of the computer. You can watch a demo of their product online, as shown in Figure 19-3.

Figure 19-3: Infusionsoft specializes in an all-in-one system.