The best CRM system?
Who produces the best CRM?
It’s an interesting question because whenever I speak to partners in professional services everybody berates their CRM system. It matters not whether it’s new, old, or even dear old Microsoft Dynamics… Very few people actually find them useful and worse still — use them at all!
Salesforce of course is very good — except to have one that’s fully mobile and useful costs an arm and a leg per person.
The key is not complexity and how much they will do, but simplicity and how simple they are to use.
Because a CRM is worth its weight in gold only if everybody uses it!
Since I set up my own business, we’ve always relied on our CRM to track conversations, children, holidays, issues people are battling with, those joining, leaving, and people who refer work. Without it, I simply do not understand how you can run anything but a two-partner practice.
We are frequently asked “Improve our cross-selling“ and of course the answer is two fold:
- Stop calling it selling.
- Use the CRM.
Then you’ve got a fighting chance of discovering exactly what work you do for your clients and where you have services that you’ve yet to discuss with them. One firm we worked with discovered a potential 30% increase in revenue if they focused on one particular service line and brought it up to the national average provided for their clients.
But of course, nobody is going to use their CRM are they?
So, who really produces the “best” CRM for professional services firms? The truth is… none of them, if adoption is poor. But here’s how the main players compare:
CRM Comparison for Law & Accounting Firms
|
CRM
|
Pros
|
Cons
|
Best For
|
|---|---|---|---|
|
Salesforce
|
Hugely powerful, highly customisable, strong mobile capability.
|
Expensive per seat, requires heavy configuration.
|
Large firms with IT support.
|
|
Microsoft Dynamics
|
Integrates with Office 365, widely used in corporate environments.
|
Complex, clunky interface, adoption challenges.
|
Firms already wedded to Microsoft stack.
|
|
HubSpot
|
Clean, intuitive UI, free/low-cost entry, good integrations.
|
Limited advanced features unless you upgrade.
|
Mid-size firms needing easy adoption.
|
|
Zoho CRM
|
Affordable, flexible, AI features creeping in.
|
Can feel generic, less tailored to professional services.
|
Small–mid firms on a budget.
|
|
Pipedrive
|
Very simple, visual pipeline, easy adoption.
|
Lacks depth for complex professional services work.
|
Smaller firms needing simplicity.
|
|
Capsule (Capsule’s UK CRM blog)
|
UK-based, straightforward, affordable, praised for usability.
|
Less feature-rich at scale.
|
SMEs and regional firms.
|
For more views, TechRadar’s Best CRM guide and Capterra UK’s Top CRM rankings are worth exploring.
So my question is… does anyone out there actually have the magic bullet? A CRM that their whole firm chooses to use — and where they really reap the rewards?
It’s as much about how to shift culture as anything else, and if you would like any help with this or a general chat about what we are seeing and hearing please contact paul@thegrogroup.com