At a certain point in the life cycle of a business, using a CRM tool becomes a must in order to get to the next level. Managing contacts, deals, and to-do lists become too much to handle manually (hello complicated Excel sheets) and important details start to fall in between the cracks.
To maintain and increase productivity, which leads to more sales and revenues, an effective CRM tool is a must.
There are dozens of CRM tools to choose from and it can be hard to decide on the right one for you.
Two of the top CRM tools available in the market today are Salesmate and ActiveCampaign. So if you had to choose one over the other, which should you choose? Let’s first take a closer look at both of them.
Salesmate vs ActiveCampaign
Salesmate is an award-winning CRM tool made for small businesses and startups. It offers all the features needed in a complete CRM tool packaged in an easy and straightforward user experience.
After a simple sign-up process requiring your email address and some information about your company, you have access to your dashboard where you can start using Salesmate immediately.
The whole process takes just a few minutes. At first glance, you’ll notice that Salesmate has a clean and simple interface, making it very easy to use.
When you open the Salesmate dashboard, you’ll see the first steps they suggest to get started:
1) Connect your email account to Salesmate – this will allow you to send emails automatically from Salesmate, automatically log incoming emails, and know who is engaging with your emails.
2) Add contacts – you can import contacts from CSV, Excel, or Google contacts.
3) Invite teammates – invite teammates to try Salesmate’s collaboration features
When you scroll down the dashboard, you’ll also find other important features such as Deal Pipeline that shows how many deals you have at various stages – like New, Contacted, Qualified, Presentation Presented, and In Negotiation with the equivalent amounts for each stage of the pipeline.
You’ll also find My Agenda – which is basically a to-do list of activities, emails, and texts you need to get done. Like with everything else on the dashboard, you can rename this section (for example, you might want to change it to Just do it! to give you a stronger reminder) or remove it completely from your dashboard (if you just want to forget about everything you need to do).
Activity Performance Overview is also found on the dashboard. This is made with sales reps in mind. Here, you’ll be able to see how productive your reps, or employees, are being for a certain date range.
You can see how many emails were sent, meetings were accomplished, notes created, and more. This is a great feature for visual people who want to see the total amount of work being done in a snapshot.
On the left side of the dashboard, there are shortcuts to get to the platform’s different features. Here are a few of them:
- Contacts – add your existing contacts to your Salesmate account
- Deals – add monetary equivalents to deals and see how much the deal can be worth for the business
- Team Inbox – this is a collaborative tool that aims to give greater visibility to what the whole team is doing and also help solve customer queries more efficiently. Emails can be tagged and assigned and internal discussions can be started by tagging teammates.
- Reports – In our opinion, this is one of the most important features of Salesmate. Here you can see a screenshot of how you and the rest of the team is doing in terms of everything important – from sales insights, how much time has been spent on calls with prospects, won deals, and more.
- Email Templates, Suggested Contacts, Email Tracking, and Sequences – you can create your own templates, receive suggested contacts based on emails you’ve sent and received, track emails including opening emails, while sequences allow you to activate email automation.
Overall, I can’t say anything negative about Salesmate. Its a complete CRM tool that will definitely help anyone streamline their work-related activities and more importantly, keep track of productivity. This will help organize ans streamline any business or organization, no matter what size.
ActiveCampaign is the fastest-growing all-in-on sales and marketing platform and boasts of over 90,000 small and medium business users. However, it is not usually at the top of people’s minds when CRM tools are discussed. ActiveCampaign is better known as an email marketing platform, and a great one at that.
However, it has excellent automation features and does offer a CRM tool, which makes ActiveCampaign fit perfectly into the CRM universe. In ActiveCampaign’s own words it offers “a sales CRM with automation that stops tasks from piling up on your desk.”
Creating an ActiveCampaign account is also easy to set up and doesn’t need anything other than an email address, basic company information, your goals, and what other software you currently use. You don’t even need a credit card to start your free trial.
ActiveCampaign has so may different features that a whole article wouldn’t be enough to discuss them all. Here are just a few things that you can do with ActiveCampaign, specifically as part of its CRM tool:
1) Create deal pipelines – you’ll be able to plan out your deals from start to finish
2) Assign tasks to leads – ensure that each of your sales leads are productive by assigning tasks to them
3) Assign deals to leads – you can also assign specific deals to your sales leads depending on rules you set, like location or lead type
4) Lead scoring – assign points to leads to have a better picture of who you should be spending more or less time on to turn leads into deals
To avail of the CRM features, you need to be on the Plus or higher plan. One great thing about ActiveCampaign is that it connects all of your email marketing data allowing you to look at your data and act to complete sales quickly. ActiveCampaign offers lead scoring which also helps make sales follow ups efficient.
No doubt about it, ActiveCampaign is a great tool that for any business. It has all the email marketing features and CRM tools required to become a more efficient, and more profitable, organization.
Although it has a slightly more complicated dashboard compared to Salesmate due to the sheer number of features it offers, ActiveCampaign is still easy to use.
Email Marketing Automation
When talking about email marketing automation, ActiveCampaign has an edge over Salesmate. Most reviews will say that the strength of ActiveCampaign lies in its automations. It offers automation in everything from sales follow ups, re-engaging past customers who haven’t purchased lately, to finding your most engaged contacts.
Another plus point for ActiveCampaign is that its easy to create these automations. It’s almost as easy as creating a simple flowchart that ActiveCampaign turns into marketing automation, with hardly any extra effort on your part.
Automation is also a key feature of Salesmate. You can create different sequences that sends emails to leads and customers depending on when you want them sent. To create a sequence, you need to create and use an email template, then determine the level of automation you want to use in getting in touch with leads.
All in all, both Salesmate and ActiveCampaign offer streamlined email marketing automations that anyone can set up and start using immediately.
Pricing
Let’s compare the two platforms in terms of pricing:
Salesmate offers 3 plans:
1) Starter – perfect for small teams and start-ups.
- $12/month, billed annually
2) Growth – the most popular plan which gives the “best value for growing teams”, in Salesmate’s own words
- $24/month, billed annually
3) Boost – has the most features and aimed at boosting your company’s overall performance.
- $40/month, billed annually
If you create a Salesmate account, you can avail of a 15-day free trial for either of the 3 plan. Even with the free trial, you can already start inviting teammates to test if Salesmate is the right tool for you and your organization.
Each plan differs in the features offered. For example, in terms of Sales Automations, the Starter plan offers 10, the Growth plan offers 25 and the Boost gives its users up to 50 kinds of different automations. In Reports, the Starter package does not have custom reports and a custom dashboard available, but both Growth and Boost offer them.
Fortunately, the most important features of any CRM are available in all plans – such as email tracking, sales funnels, and deal boards (pipeline) views. These are essential in helping automate your sales process, managing data, and the most important – increasing productivity.
Another notable thing about Salesmate is that the customer support offered is the same, no matter what plan you choose. Other CRM platforms change the availability of customer support depending on your plan. In my opinion, this is a very important feature that all users should look at.
Nothing is worse than having a question on how to use something and no one to ask. All packages offer customer service available 24/5 via email, chat, remote/screen sharing with audio and of course, self service which is available all the time.
Now let’s take a look at ActiveCampaign‘s pricing plans. ActiveCampaign offers a 14-day free trial to help you decide if its the right platform for you. Compared to Salesmate’s 3 plans, ActiveCampaign offers 4 different plans with varying features.
Because it is primarily an email marketing tool, pricing is based on your number of subscribers. As the number of subscribers increase, the price of each plan increases as well. Here is sample annual pricing for a business or organization that has 500 contacts:
1) Lite
- $9/month, billed annually
2) Plus
- $49/month, billed annually
3) Professional
- $129/month, billed annually
4) Enterprise
- $229/month, billed annually
Each plan differs in the number of users, SMS marketing availability, split automations, and other features.
As previously mentioned, CRM with Sales Automation is available in the Plus plan and higher. If your contact list goes up to 2,500 contacts for example, pricing for the Lite plan becomes $49 and the Standard plan becomes $99. This makes ActiveCampaign significantly more expensive than Salesmate.
Salesmate vs ActiveCampaign – Which is better?
If you’re looking for an all-in-one tool that you can use for everything from email marketing to following up tasks with a teammate, ActiveCampaign is the product for you.
It’s no wonder that tens of thousands of small businesses around the world are using it. It saves companies from having to use multiple platforms and software for email marketing, project management, and CRM. However, it’s worth noting that ActiveCampaign is significantly more expensive than Salesmate.
On the other hand, if you’re happy with your current email marketing platform and are just looking for a CRM tool that can help you get more organized and streamlined and help boost productivity, Salesmate might be the one for you. It has just the right amount of features and its wallet-friendly plans and easy-to-use interface are added bonuses.
No matter which you CRM choose, both Salesmate and ActiveCampaign are great platforms to invest in when looking to upgrade and expand your company or organization. With the right CRM tool, you’ll be able to save time and energy and increase productivity all at the same time.