Creatio CRM

Creatio CRM is a comprehensive sales and marketing software with plenty of tools to create campaigns and keep deals moving. The platform does a good job of categorizing leads to help streamline the sales process. However, Creatio CRM is somewhat complicated to use and getting access to all of the features can be very expensive.

Creatio CRM: Plans and Pricing

Creatio CRM is divided into three different softwares: Sales, Marketing, and Service.

Sales Creatio is the primary CRM platform, with tools for lead follow-up and deal management. Sales Creatio costs $300 per user per year.

(Image credit: Creatio CRM)

Marketing Creatio includes tools for email campaigns, event forms, and lead generation. Plans start at $875 per user per year for up to 1,000 contacts and five emails per contact per month.

Service Creatio is essentially a helpdesk software. It costs $420 per user per year.

Note that you can bundle these three services together or choose a custom number of licenses of each software to distribute across your business. Creatio CRM provides a pricing tool to help you determine what a bundled package will cost.

Creatio CRM: Features

Creatio CRM has a very robust set of features, particularly if you have access to all three component software systems. Note that managers can get access to a special version of Creatio CRM that allows you to switch between Sales, Marketing, and Service from the platform dashboard.

Sales Creatio

Sales Creatio focuses on shepherding deals through your sales team from prospective to closed. The platform gives sales team members a number of ways to create notes about clients’ needs. For example, leads can be categorized according to a ‘Customer Need’ field rather than only by deal status. It’s also easy to track the entire history of a contact, including how that lead was acquired and any associated calls, emails, and notes.

One of the best features of Creatio CRM is the low-level workflow automation that takes place without any effort on your part. When you add a new lead, the platform will automatically create a reminder in your calendar to prompt you to follow-up. The reminder is even populated with information from the lead categorization fields to let you know what to follow up about—for example, service pricing or the client’s needs.

Of course, Sales Creatio also includes a sales funnel view where you can see your deals in progress. This wasn’t as interactive as what some other CRM tools offer, though. You can’t search for deals by sales rep or easily drag and drop deals between stages.

(Image credit: Creatio CRM)

Marketing Creatio

Marketing Creatio is where the magic of generating new leads and contacts happens. The platform excels at email marketing, with advanced tools like automated email triggers if a message isn’t opened after a certain amount of time. You can get access to email templates and send bulk emails right from the software, which maximizes the efficiency of your sales team.

The software can also help you set up online forms, such as event registrations and contact forms. However, this process is anything but seamless. You’ll need to have some HTML knowledge to customize your forms, since you have to edit the code directly to make changes.

The other area where Marketing Creatio falls surprisingly short is social media. The software doesn’t have any tools for monitoring client activity on social networks or for scraping leads from LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter.

(Image credit: Creatio CRM)

Service Creatio

Service Creatio is a very capable helpdesk tool. When integrated with the Sales or Marketing software, team members have access to contacts’ full histories. Any service interactions via phone or email can easily be added to a client’s record.

Perhaps the most helpful feature of Service Creatio is the reporting tool. This allows you to quickly determine what’s causing the most helpdesk cases across your business or for an individual client. You can also easily monitor how long it typically takes to resolve any issues that crop up.

(Image credit: Creatio CRM )

Creatio CRM: Interface and use

Creatio CRM is a relatively user-friendly platform once you get into it. However, setting up the platform initially can take a significant amount of work. You need to decide not only which employees need which software licenses, but you need to adapt all of the settings for how notifications and data propagate across the three modules to your business environment.

That said, Creatio CRM does offer a decent amount of dashboard customization to help users get the most out of the software. It’s simple to hide features that you don’t need for your business. Plus, the main menu on the left side of the screen is largely self-explanatory and notifications, email, and SMS messages are always accessible from icons on the right.

Creatio CRM: Support

Creatio CRM has a readily available customer service team. You can contact support by phone Monday to Friday, or send an email and get an answer back within a few hours. The company also offers ‘Creatio Academy,’ where you’ll find extensive documentation, training, and even certification tests for employees.

(Image credit: Creatio CRM)

Creatio CRM: The competition

Creatio CRM’s main shortcomings are that the software suite is expensive and it lacks extensive integration with social media platforms. Both Zoho CRM and Nimble are more affordable for small businesses and allow you to generate leads from social media. So, if your business depends heavily on Twitter and LinkedIn, these alternative platforms may be worth a look.

Creatio CRM: Final verdict

Creatio CRM is a capable platform for managing leads and helping your sales team close deals. However, the division of the software into three components limits the suite of tools that are available to any one employee and drives up the overall price of the platform. On top of that, Creatio CRM doesn’t offer virtually any integration with social media networks.

• You can signup for Creatio CRM here