Customer relationship management (CRM) software is essential to any sales or service-oriented business- which explains why it’s one of the most active categories on Capterra. Especially today, customers have more channels than ever before (social, mobile, web, email, phone, etc.) to interact with companies. Naturally, this means there are even more ways for companies to access and sort all of that customer information.
Needless to say, choosing CRM software can be pretty overwhelming. Whether you’re buying a CRM for the first time or looking to make a switch, it’s a big decision…and one that will likely impact several (if not all) of the departments in your organization.
Before you jump into the complex and confusing world of selecting a CRM, it’s helpful to know some of the leaders in the space. While these “market leaders” might not be the best fit for your sales and customer service needs, they will give you good a framework for comparison as you start your search.
That’s why I’m proud to introduce Capterra’s latest infographic: The Top 20 Most Popular CRM Software Solutions.
The History
Around this time last year, Capterra hosted the first ever CRM Madness competition- pitting 64 leading CRM software providers against one another in a March Madness-style bracket. Based on a variety of company metrics and fan votes, we whittled down the CRMs round by round over several weeks. Ultimately, SugarCRM emerged victorious.
While last year’s tournament was a big success and pulled in thousands of votes, we wanted a more objective way to show which CRMs are really leading the pack. That’s why this year, we decided to switch things up a bit with our new Top 20 CRM infographic. It’s one in a series of infographics we’ve released this year that rank the top solutions in various software categories.
The Research
In a $10 billion+ industry, finding the most popular CRM software is no easy task. We used our popularity index to help narrow down the list of CRMs from almost 400 solutions. The index is based off of the number of customers, number of users, and social presence of each CRM company.
Want the play-by-play of our research process? Check out all the details here.
The Data
Below you will find the raw data from our CRM industry research. Please note that we discovered a few of the data points from third party sources (*). Aside from those marked, we received the rest of the data directly from the vendors themselves, and to our knowledge, it can’t be found anywhere else on the web.
(1) Salesforce users - https://www.salesforce.com/form/signup/freetrial-lb.jsp
(2) Zoho users - http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Enterprise-Applications/Zoho-CRM-Gets-Google-Calendar-Sync-LinkedIn-Integration-420090/
(3) Zoho customers - http://www.zoho.com/crm/
(4) Oracle users - http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/siebel/018807.pdf
(5) Oracle customers - http://agendabuilder.gartner.com/CRF14/webpages/VendorDetail.aspx?Vendor=16
(6) SugarCRM users and customers - http://www.sugarcrm.com/newspress/sugarcrm-appoints-senior-sales-executive-glenn-cross-executive-vice-president-worldwide
(7) Update users - http://www.update.com/About-us/Company
(8) 37signals states that they have thousands of customers and tens of thousands of users for Highrise, so to make the algorithm fair, we translated those into specific numbers, which are likely lower than their actual metrics
As I mentioned, this research and ranking is based strictly on our popularity index and nothing else. It’s a great resource to get your bearings and identify some of the popular CRMs based on how many other companies use this software, but we did not compare each of these solutions feature for feature. You may find that these CRMs are far too complex or far too simple for your specific needs. For a comprehensive list, check out our CRM Software Directory.
What do you look for most in a CRM? Is there other data we could provide that could help you in your search?