Act vs Salesforce—A Comparison Before you Opt for a CRM

Modern businesses have modern needs and requirements. To fulfil these requirements, there are needed advanced technical tools and high-tech applications and software. Also, there are various CRMs in the market that are designed and developed for different businesses.

For instance, experts suggest different CRM platforms for different businesses. If your target is to cater to offer the best customer support, then you need to opt for Zendesk. If you are working with agile teams, you need to try out monday.com WFH templates that it introduced at the time of COVID-19. Various manufacturing and logistics industries prefer using Odoo CRM. You see, the choice of the CRM for your business will depend on your business.

Here, in this article, we are going to discuss Act vs Salesforce so that you may know if these CRMs are for your company or not.

Act vs Salesforce—Features Comparison

The most important thing that you need to compare while investing money in a CRM is the features comparison. So, there you go!

1. Contact & Lead Management

Every sales cycle starts with lead generation and lead nurturing. When you deal with leads and contacts manually, there are involved emotions and sentiments that can ruin your customer relations. So, you need to have automated tools for contact and lead management. Both Act! and Salesforce offer lead management features. However, Act is better than Salesforce for small businesses. Act! is suitable for businesses seeking a straightforward contact and lead management solution with basic lead tracking and activity logging.

Salesforce excels in providing robust and advanced contact and lead management capabilities suitable for businesses of all sizes.

2. Marketing Automation

Act! provides basic marketing automation features that let customers set up drip marketing sequences, generate and distribute email campaigns, and monitor engagement metrics. Act!’s marketing automation may not have the cutting-edge functionality and scalability required for more extensive and focused marketing initiatives, even while it is ideal for smaller organisations looking for basic automation capabilities. In order to further expand its capabilities, integration with third-party technologies might be required.

On the other hand, Salesforce offers a comprehensive and sophisticated platform and Salesforce Marketing Cloud marketing automation features. These systems let companies build sophisticated multi-channel campaigns, customise customer journeys, carry out sophisticated lead scoring, and use AI-driven analytics for more successful marketing tactics. Enterprises and corporations looking for complete capabilities to manage their marketing initiatives throughout the whole customer lifecycle are better suited for Salesforce’s marketing automation.

3. Customer Support & Service

Comparatively speaking to more specialised customer service solutions, Act!’s customer assistance skills are somewhat constrained. Act! may be adequate for handling routine customer questions for companies with straightforward support requirements and smaller client bases. On the other hand, Salesforce’s Service Cloud platform provides a broad range of customer support and service features. These solutions allow companies to quickly respond to client enquiries, automate case routing and escalation, offer self-service choices through portals, and even use chatbots that are driven by artificial intelligence (AI).

Price Comparison of Act! & Salesforce

Next, it is very important to discuss pricing plans offered by Act! and Salesforce. Usually, Act is considered the best choice for small businesses and startups because of its pricing plans. Also, it has pricing plans for cloud-based platforms and on-premise software. Other than pricing plans for its CRMs, Act shares its prices for add-ons and additional features etc. On the other hand, Salesforce has extensive pricing plans for marketing, sales, and eCommerce cloud services and features. You see, it is an established platform. So, it has a range of pricing plans. Though Act is considered the best for small businesses, Salesforce pricing plans can also be considerable in the sense that when businesses scale with time, they need to transition to a better tech stack. However, if you invest money in established platforms, there will be no need to adopt another software. The same tech stack will be able to cater to your increasing business needs.

Integration Options

No matter whether you opt for Act or Salesforce, your CRM should be flexible enough to integrate with other applications and software. Act! offers integration with a range of popular tools, such as Microsoft Office, Google Workspace, and various accounting and marketing applications. Users can connect their CRM with these platforms to streamline their workflows. However, for more complex integrations or specialized software needs, Act! users may need to use third-party tools or put in additional effort. On the other hand, Salesforce is always known for its extensive ecosystem of integrations. Additionally, Salesforce provides robust API access, enabling businesses to build custom integrations tailored to their unique requirements.

Whether you need Act! or Salesforce, Techloyce offers integration of Salesforce so that you can run your business processes seamlessly. Contact us now!

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