Dear Jenae — What inexpensive and easy customer relationship management tool do you recommend?

“CRM tools – can you recommend any that are easy to use and not too expensive?  I am looking for something to help me with marketing to new clients and scheduling for chasing up new leads etc.”
– Becky
Hi Becky,
Thanks for your question – it’s a great one. There are a lot of great tools out there but my favorite is Pipedrive (linked below). It’s only $12.50 (USD) a month and is cloud-based, which is really helpful. There are a ton of features but my favorite part is that if you prefer something simple, you can ignore the complexities and dive right in. On the other hand, if you’re looking for something more robust, it likely has what you need. I’m a VERY visual person so I love the drag/drop feature for moving prospects from lead to negotiation and ultimately to the sale. It is also really easy to set up reminders to follow up so you don’t let leads go cold and you can customize the reminders. I use the daily digest version where all the activities are sent in a single e-mail but there are a few customization options.
If you plan to go this route, I highly suggest combining it with a tool like Yesware, which I also love if you’re going to be using Pipedrive regularly and you would like to track e-mail exchanges with your prospects inside Pipedrive. Yesware allows you to set up your unique Pipedrive-created e-mail address as BCC and, when you tick the CRM box within Yesware, it automatically communicates your e-mails to Pipedrive and assigns them to the relevant prospect so when you open up a prospect in Pipedrive, you have all the information you could possibly want including previous e-mails sent, your notes, activities you’ve set up, etc. I think this is particularly useful when prospects take a long time to close or if you think a lead has gone cold and then the company pops back up. You can easily catch back up on where you were with that lead before they went cold.
I have been using Pipedrive and teaching it for years now. It’s been one of my go-to tools! Just a couple of months ago, I finally also became an affiliate for them so that means through this link, you can get a full month for free to test it out. If you have a chance to try it, let me know what you think!
Readers, if you use something else, what do you use and why do you love it?
I have two courses on Pipedrive because it can actually be easily modified to also serve as a project management tool:
Course on Pipedrive as CRM
Course on Pipedrive as project management tool
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Author: Jenae Spry

Jenae has been a French > English translator for over 10 years and a productivity and performance coach for freelancers for over 5 years. Jenae launched the Success by Rx blog to help freelancers achieve success.

Posted in Ask Jenae, Business, Technology.

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