Agency CRMs – Analysis and recommendations

A discussion in an agency community piqued my interest about how agencies are using CRMs in their business. The thread was started by an agency owner looking for CRM recommendations and the responses were largely people responding with their favourite of the usual suspects. What struck me was how different the tools were that were being recommended and how no-one really considered what functionality the OP’s business needed. This tallied with what I often see in agencies: The term “CRM” now covers a lot of bases. There are some very capable tools that would be a very poor fit for many agencies and I frequently see time, money and opportunity being wasted in trying to adopt a poor choice.

25% of Agencies are not using a CRM.
60% of those that do say they are not utilising it well

To understand the space a bit better, I ran a survey that just under 30 agencies responded to. The responses from this confirmed my feeling that people are looking for very different things from CRM software and that many agencies are struggling to find value in the solution they select. They also really highlight the risks on selecting solutions like CRMs based on popularity, cost or “free” tiers rather than long term fit.

The most important features of an agency CRM

Modern CRMs now offer a wide range of features, with each having their own bias and mix. I started by asking respondents to rank the feature groups most important to them. The list below outlines the common areas of CRM functionality ranked in order of overall importance to respondents.  The bullet points under each category relate to respondent answers about the most important features.

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1. Customer/Contact Management

   • “It enables me to systematically keep up with/nurture my network”
   • “Notes to my future self for further down the client journey. “
   • “Each client record shows personal notes about their business, which opportunities I have spotted in order of priority.”

2. Sales Pipeline Management

   • “Total visibility of our sales pipeline and visibility of warmer contacts”
   • “Sales pipeline management – new business and recurring so easy to track revenue forecasts “
   • “Keep track of when I need to contact someone in the pipeline.”

3. Outbound Communications

   • “Having everyone’s details in one place makes it *loads* easier if we want to message everyone or send an invitation/Christmas card. Previously this sort of stuff would be such a pain we just wouldn’t bother”
   • “High delivering emails and user friendly to allow is to push to our clients.”
   • “Being able to send targeted communications to different audiences at the right time”

4. Marketing Performance Tracking

   • “Alignment across Marketing, Sales, Client Services, with visibility of messaging and engagements.”
   • “I get to see exactly what content and what channels are driving revenue – not just driving clicks.”

I also asked how satisfied the respondents were with their CRMs support of these feature categories, and included pricing, support and ease of use in this question. What is evident from this is that people are not bowled over by the software they choose to manage their customer relations. The two marketing areas (outbound comms and marketing performance) score lowest, but largely as a result of these features being missing entirely from some CRMs (again highlighting the importance of fit).

Which CRMs are agencies using?

Even with the limited size sample group, a lot of CRM solutions were mentioned, resulting in “other” being the third most popular answer.  The #1 solution wasn’t a surprise though as HubSpot is always the most mentioned solution when talking to agencies, often as a result of their free tier and perceived difficulty in migrating away. The #2 result was a bit of a surprise though with nearly a quarter of agencies not using any CRM system at all (I included people deceiving themselves by saying Google Sheets are their CRM in this group!). Other honourable mentions go to Pipedrive and Productive. One noticeable omission is Salesforce. Despite it’s global popularity, Salesforce didn’t get a single mention in the responses.

This is a difficult chart for me personally, as none of the top three named solutions are ones I would recommend to most agencies who asked me about implementing a CRM. Each solution has some very positive traits (and I would consider myself an experienced user in all three), but there are reasons I wouldn’t select any of them in the specific circumstances of an agency looking for a CRM. In short:

• HubSpot is easily the most rounded of the three (and the only one with real marketing support), but only if you are willing to pay a very significant sum to enable the necessary features. With all the features enabled it is a very expensive option. Without them it is not a very capable option. Hubspot scored low overall on satisfaction with pricing and support being the key issues.
• Pipedrive is simple but capable. It is really a sales management tool and the lack of marketing support makes it a poor fit for the way most agencies sell. When I work with agencies using Pipedrive we often need to have a second CRM running in order to answer even simple questions like which channels are bringing revenue.
• Productive is an all in one agency management tool. Whilst I quite like it, the CRM is undoubtedly the weakest part of their line up.  It’s a tool I have recommended in the past, but not when the specific need is a CRM (and again, I’d favour running a dedicated marketing aware CRM alongside it).

I’ll share a few recommendations that I do make lower down in this post. I think this reluctance of mine to recommend at of those leaders is reflected in overall scores from respondents. I don’t think any scored particularly well, but the three most popular choices above were all around 60% overall. Also worth noting that this includes responses from at least two HubSpot certified agencies whose scores definitely brought up the average but might not be representative of the average client experience.

A shout out here for ActiveCampaign for the highest overall score. I haven’t used ActiveCampaign for years and it was more of a specialist mailing tool than a full CRM back then. I will be checking it out again soon as a result of this survey.

 

How well are we using our CRMs?

Asking agency owners how well their agency utilises the capability of their chosen CRM turned up some interesting results. Only around a third of respondents said they thought they were using their CRM well or very well. We can also see correlation between how well we utilise the tools and our satisfaction with them, which I have shown in the scatter chart below. Although the data doesn’t show whether adoption leads to satisfaction, or satisfaction to adoption, the comments that accompany the score heavily suggest it is the former.

Why aren’t we using them more?

The comments suggest that time, complexity and frustration with the tools themselves as the main barriers to further adoption.  Here are a few of those comments:

• “It feels like hard work – nothing is really simple”
• “Spending the time to set something up that does what we need properly. Nothing ever works ‘off the shelf’ so always needs a degree of customisation.”
• “We’re using other stuff for email marketing (Mailchimp) and sales pipeline (spreadsheet and project management tool) so it’s just the effort involved with switching. Currently it’d be a bunch of effort for not a hugely noticeable improvement so further CRM setup is on the back burner.”
• “The ballache of contacting support, and having to work it out myself. Seems like a task too far when its all so busy anyway”
• “A lack of knowledge about the platform and how best to utilise it”
• “Time (the most popular answer by far)”

Thoughts and conclusions

So, what are we to make of this? I have a few thoughts

• We’re all looking for different things from our CRMs and the products are equally varied
• Despite that variance, very few people are bowled over by their CRM
• Most of us feel we aren’t using our CRMs to their full potential, but time and complexity stop us doing it better
• The better we use our CRMs, the happier we are with them (although there are diminishing returns on that)
• Under utilising our CRMs leads to significant dissatisfaction
• With nearly a quarter of respondents not using CRMs, this feels like an easy improvement to make

How to find the right CRM for your agency

I’d strongly advise by starting with really considering what you need from a CRM. A well integrated CRM solution is not easy to migrate away from, so you don’t want to be changing too frequently (trust me… been there, got the T-shirt). Think about your immediate needs, but also how they are likely to change over the next few years. Every tool should do the basic contact management to a sufficient level, but think about your specific requirements:

• Do you need your CRM to be marketing aware? Many aren’t
• What channels do you use?
• What other systems do you need to integrate with?
• What will your usage (contacts, outgoing messages, users) look like in the coming year or two?

Don’t just assume that the cheapest or most popular option will be right for you because others like it, as your needs might be very different. Be sure to cost it for the future you are aiming for as well as today, as the costs can ramp up to an eye-watering level with some options (*cough* HubSpot *cough*) and following the crowd can get expensive.

Yes, yes, yes, but what CRMs do you recommend Mat?

This is tricky, because it really does depend on the needs of each agency and I wouldn’t give an unqualified recommendation without knowing more about what the business needs to achieve. I may sometimes recommend one of the top 3 mentioned above, but more often not for the reasons I already outlined. In particular, proper marketing support is an absolute non-negotiable for me. Managing the pipeline is fine, but I want to know exactly where each deal came from and what content and channels contributed to that. I personally think this is the MOST VALUABLE function of a good CRM yet many don’t support it, and I honestly don’t know a single CRM that does it as well as it should.

Recently recommended:

FreshSales : In my less kind moments I may have described FreshSales as “If Temu did HubSpot”. That’s rather unfair, but gets across the point that it really is an affordable way to get HubSpot like functionality for a tiny fraction of the cost.  This is what I am currently using in my own business and what I have implemented for several Agency clients. It has a few odd UI and Product choices, but is a solid CRM that covers all the key areas pretty well. It doesn’t do dashboards as well as HubSpot and the marketing automation isn’t quite to the same level, but is a pretty solid choice for many. Support is also responsive and the pricing is good. It even has a free tier that is more functional than most. They have a few versions of the product, but most agencies will be looking at Freshsales Suite.

Zoho : We had greater success with Zoho in my old agency than any other CRM we used or trialled. It is very powerful, sensibly priced and can be made to do most things and comes with a huge number of add-ons. It’s a while since I used it now, but the downsides used to be that the system itself felt rather old and disjointed (it’s a suite of connected products rather than a single product) and can be very complicated to set-up. As such, I would only recommend Zoho when I knew there was resource available to dedicate to the more involved set-up and integration. However, if an Agency needed a CRM integrated with systems as diverse as e-signing, webinars, HR, and the hundreds of other parts of the suite, I’d still be looking at  Zoho CRM as an option.

AgileCRM: Another CRM that probably deserves to be more popular than it is. AgileCRM is one of the nicer CRMs I have used (and probably the one I will switch to again if I change). It’s another CRM that covers all the main areas, and probably has stronger reporting and better UX than my current choice. The main drawback I see is reports that the support have worsened since I used it last. Find out more about AgileCRM here.

A few others to consider

• ActiveCampaign looks interesting now, having developed from a email marketing platform to marketing led CRM. One I want to learn more about, although pricing looks higher than many. More here.
• Odoo I have it on good authority that you can implement marketing tracking through a workaround in Odoo, which might make is a contender for me again. Main potential downside is it requiring more set-up work than most. More here.
• Ontraport I know very little about this, but the feature set, reviews and pricing make it interesting to me. One I will definitely be learning more about . More here.

EDIT: As a result of doing this research and writing, I think I am going to switch CRM and try Agile again. I’ve been going back over the features and reviews of every CRM that has come up in this study and Agile’s stronger marketing toolset means that I want to give it another try. Fresh has ticked all the boxes for me at close to zero cost, but I’m interested to see if I can do more using Agile.

EDIT 2 : Agile seem to currently have an issue with their Gsuite integration which makes it a non starter for me. What a shame. I’ll remove this notice if they update me that it is resolved. I wasn’t bowled over with the way they handled this to be honest, so I may or may not be motivated to investigate further at that point.

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