Top 5 CRMs ?

The “young” Pipedrive is already acknowledged among 5 best CRMs in the market.

You may wonder what made Pipedrive good, or you can ask who has tested it. Read here what makes Pipedrive so good for sales process management!

Ranking Top 5 CRMs

What interests me, instead, more than knowing the ranking of top 5 CRMs, is the use of third party opinion makers that rank software tools in the market. Not long ago I’ve been personally asked to make a review on a famous software website reviews about a solution developed by a startup – I was used to knowing them -.  The funny thing is that they promised to pay me back with an Amazon voucher.  -I politely refused that, not because the solution wasn’t good, maybe it was, but to waste my time on writing a false review on a website that pays reviews is something unacceptable for me: where is the independent opinion?  

Same here, I can see that recently this website “https://top5-crm.com/” has listed a bunch of CRM faking their own independence, and because of that losing their “maybe once” reputable opinion.

The risk of tools like this is that you have to be on those “experts websites” if you are a vendor, no matter if they are good or bad, trying to accomplish their logic -as long as some buyer may believe them-.

If you go ahead and read the title: “Try our user’s choice … TODAY!” We all know that vendors often have referral programmes in place.

But this is not the real problem. Is when they say: ” Set up in under 2 minutes”  that the trick takes place. How can someone imagine that a CRM can be set up in 2 minutes with NO knowledge? This may mislead buyers, generally with no experience at all, who can be attracted by the idea of simplicity. 

The reality is that they are stuck, after setting up a default account they have no idea how to make it work for them and they often end in failed implementation projects!

I raise my voice to warn:

do not believe this ranking websites as well as many “opinion makers” who sell themselves as knowledgeable: –According to Daniel Kahneman: experts are more prone to fail than you may expect-. This means that the real value of these opinions may rely on marketing logic.

I personally tested most of the tools in their first page and when I read things like “The real customer centric CRM”  or “Cloud-based solution delivering a 360° view of your customers” or even more laughing “Entire customer life-cycle in one place **14-day free trial**“…

They are just MARKETING slogans.

As testing CRMs is part of our daily commitment both, when clients ask to migrate tools as well as when they ask to select a solution that fits their business requirements.

I mean I do not mind if someone likes one or another brand or tool for good reasons, the world is beautiful because it is varied… What I can’t take is when someone tries to make money selling debatable knowledge, something that always goes at the expense of other people.

But let’s say that: Being in the top 5 CRMs or even among the top 10 CRMs is something with little or no sense. Pipedrive has to be there, in these ranking websites, as well as Zendesk, Hubspot and Freshdesk have to do it, and they are all very useful tools, but I confute that these kinds of “independent third parties” rank are any useful for buyers! They are actually possibly misleading people who have no knowledge of the topic.

Let’s take G2, one of the most reputable software evaluation tools, widely read by many.

In the CRM section they rank as follow (on August 2022)

1. Salesforce
2. Hubspot
3. Active Campaign

Quite an easy ranking isn’t it: try to check each vendors’ marketing budget, I wouldn’t be surprised if they rank on top of vendors’ marketing expenditure… 

Are they really the BEST CRMs?

Maybe, but we should agree on two points first: 

• What does it means “best”

• Best for which use?

We help entrepreneurs on a daily basis to define what CRM tools they may benefit from, and we can see that reading the “descriptions” of each vendor -that are just marketing claims- nobody can make any decision about them.

As usual in marketing everyone appears FANTASTIC, superb, they all grow your revenues magically. It doesn’t matter what kind of business you really run…

Let’s make it simple:

• Do you believe that a digital tool that is developed for small business may work either on corporation scale?
• in the opposite way, a tool developed to be effective on corporations use, may really be efficient for small and medium enterprises?
• Do you believe that a digital tool effective for e-commerce may work as well in business to business running salespeople daily duties and reports?
• Do you believe that a team who started developing a Project Management tool may be effective in delivering a CRM?

Let’s make it simple, do not investigate further, but when you, the possible buyer, read statements like this one:

“… is the easy-to-use CRM for businesses that need to manage more sales leads & grow customer relationships…“

What do you, the expected client, really feel reading this?

  “business that need to manage more sales leads“

Are you for real? Buyer, don’t you feel teased by them?

” … & grow customer relationships…“

but this is not EXACTLY what a CRM should provide?? What are you telling us specifically about your tool that is above and beyond other tools?

How can it be that the marketing of the CRM industry has so little creativity to propose always the same claims? Vendors have no fantasy, or simply have no ideas.

Slightly better performs Microsoft with this statement: “…(CRM) business solution that drives sales productivity and marketing effectiveness through social insights, business intelligence, and campaign management in the….“

At least they defined their area of best application the social insights. If that would really work is completely another matter.

We do not endorse any CRM, we used some of them and we found some very good for some specific purposes. When they are used within the original purpose they may perform well.

Pipedrive has been developed with one mission in mind: salespeople in B2B.

And in this area, the sales process management, we find it a very focused and effective tool. In other areas, like e-commerce it is simply out of question.

When authors who rank Pipedrive “Best e-commerce software tool” only show two options: they are trying to improve their SEO or they have no clue what a CRM really is…

Or both?