Top 10 Online CRM software

Latest news about Online CRM software

2023. Microsoft brings an AI-powered Copilot to Dynamics 365



Microsoft is launching a new AI tool Copilot, that aims to automate some of the more repetitive sales and customer service tasks. For example, in Dynamics 365 Sales and Viva Sales, Copilot can help write email responses to customers and create an email summary of a Teams meeting in Outlook. The meeting summary pulls in details from the seller’s CRM, such as product and pricing information and combines them with insights from the recorded Teams call. Over in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Copilot can draft “contextual answers” to customer queries via chat or email and provide an “interactive chat experience” for customer service agents that draws from knowledge bases as well as case history. In turn, conversation boosters complements a new “GPT” model in Microsoft’s AI Builder tool that lets organizations embed text-generation features into their Power Automate and Power Apps solutions.


2023. Attio raises $23.5M to build a next-gen CRM platform



Attio has raised $31.2 million for its CRM platform that combines a high-performing data model with the collaborative capabilities found in no-code software. The platform creates a database of contacts and companies that a business interacts with, allowing users to analyze and manage customer records, take notes, and create workflows that automatically update contact information. Compared to legacy CRMs, Attio's performance and pricing ($119 per user per month at the high end) set it apart as a better option. While legacy CRMs offer complex data models, they can be slow to deploy and expensive. On the other hand, CRM startups and in-house CRMs are more stable but have simplistic and rigid models.

2023. Gameball raises $3.5M to scale its CRM platform for consumer brands



Gameball, a customer intelligence and marketing CRM platform that is helping consumer brands leverage their data to grow, has raised $3.5M. Gameball says brands use its tools to build long-term relationships with customers and ensure retention through personalized loyalty programs that are informed by data. The platform helps brands to tap existing customers, who are capable of bringing greater value to businesses than new customers. Besides, businesses no longer need to spend blindly on customer acquisition through paid ads as they have an opportunity to tap existing ones via targeted campaigns and loyalty programs. Gameball is also able to give brands monetization opportunities, and help them upsell and cross-sell efficiently across their customer base.


2022. monday.com introduces monday sales CRM



monday.com, the popular project management service, has introduced monday sales CRM - a fast, intuitive customer relationship management (CRM) system built to unify all customer processes under one platform. Built on monday.com’s flexible low-code/no-code framework, monday sales CRM is a fully customizable CRM that allows to automate tedious tasks, sync your Gmail/Outlook to send & receive emails, or automatically log your sent emails, get notified automatically when a lead opens or replies to an email, manage your team’s quota attainment over time, track wins and view goals for specific members or the entire team, manage your post-sale activities in one place, so you can stay on top of client onboarding, client projects and collection tracking, plan and fast-track your sales hiring process, and equip your sales team with the tools and resources they need to close more deals. There is a free version for 2 seats, and paid version starts from €10 per seat per month.


2022. SaaS platform LeadSquared becomes unicorn with $153M funding



LeadSquared, a SaaS startup that is helping sales teams become more efficient with its CRM platform, is the latest Indian startup to become a unicorn. The startup helps firms automate sales, bringing efficiency to all the touch points where sales executives are involved including call centers, feet-on-street force and other areas including digital where consumer purchases take place. The startup provides the firms with tools to easily on-board vendors, do verifications and collections.


2021. Salesforce announces first integrations with Slack



When Salesforce acquired Slack at the end of last year for almost $28 billion, you had to figure they had some big plans for the company. Today the CRM giant announced some initial integrations that should prove useful for Salesforce customers. For starters, the Sales Cloud gets dedicated deal rooms, where all of the parties involved in a complex sale, whether internal departments like finance and product people or external partners, can come together in Slack throughout the sales cycle and stay on top of the ebb and flow of all the sales activity. The hope is that by taking advantage of Slack’s ability to integrate external enterprise apps inside the application, working together they can find ways to speed up and automate various Salesforce tasks, making it faster and easier to use without switching context to make it happen.


2021. Creatio raises $68M for its low-code CRM platform



Creatio, low-code platform that helps other companies automate business processes, has raised $68 million. Creatio also has a genre focus, namely that it touts its platform’s ability to help automate work in the CRM space — think marketing and sales-related tasks. Creatio’s competitive edge comes in part from how quickly it can help companies automate; the faster that companies can get from a low-code platform to live apps matters. The low-code world that Creatio competes in is a broad space that is seeing active investment now.


2020. Sales CRM Pipedrive becomes unicorn



Pipedrive, the sales CRM tool for small and medium-sized businesses, is the latest European company to reach unicorn status. The company has taken a majority investment from U.S. enterprise software-focused private equity firm Vista Equity Partners and is now valued at $1.5 billion dollars. Pipedrive’s calling card has always been that it is sales software designed to serve first and foremost the needs of sales people, not their managers — built by sales people, for sales people, if you like — but has since matured into a more comprehensive CRM platform play also spanning marketing. Pipedrive claims 95,000 companies use its software.


2020. Freshworks relaunches its CRM service



Freshworks, the customer and employee engagement company that offers a range of products, from call center and customer support software to HR tools and marketing automation services, today announced the launch of its newest product: Freshworks CRM. The new service, which the company built on top of its new Freshworks Neo platform, is meant to give sales and marketing teams all of the tools they need to get a better view of their customers — with a bit of machine learning thrown in for better predictions. Freshworks CRM is essentially a rebrand of the company’s Freshsales service, combined with the company’s capabilities of its Freshmarketer marketing automation tool.


2020. HubSpot’s new end-to-end sales hub aims to simplify CRM for mid-market customers



HubSpot, the firm that made its name by helping to define the in-bound marketing concept, announced the HubSpot Sales Hub Enterprise. While the company has been offering a CRM tool for five years now, where they feel they have addressed ease-of-use issues for salespeople, the new tool is about bringing a new end-to-end approach addressing not only the needs of sales people, but management and system admins, as well. HubSpot specifically sees larger companies in this space, like Adobe, Salesforce and SAP, acquiring different pieces of the stack, then incorporating them into a solution, or customers pulling together different pieces of the stack themselves. The company believes that by building a single integrated solution themselves, it’s going to be naturally easier to use.


2020. SugarCRM acquires Node to gain predictive customer intelligence



SugarCRM announced this morning it has acquired customer intelligence startup, Node. While Sugar gains a ton of AI expertise, it also adds a customer prediction element to the platform, such as figuring out the customers most likely to convert or most likely to leave. This puts it in more direct competition with Adobe and Salesforce, which for some time have had intelligence layers that provide that kind of predictability. Node was founded in 2014 and has raised over $43 million. It fills a gap for SugarCRM adding engagement analytics and action at both ends of the business, and at the same time provides a market differentiator for them.


2020. Salesforce announces a new mobile collaboration tool for sales called Anywhere



Salesforce introduced a new tool called Salesforce Anywhere that’s designed to let teams collaborate and share data wherever they happen to be. As the pandemic took hold and the company saw how important collaboration was becoming in a digital context, the idea of an app like this took on a new sense of urgency. The idea is to move beyond the database and help surface the information that matters most to individual sales people based on their pipelines. Employees can share information across a team, and have chats related to that information. While there are other chat tools out there, this tool is focused on sharing Salesforce data, rather than being general purpose like Slack or other business chat tool.


2020. Zoho introduced Bigin - pipeline-centric CRM for small business



In addition to popular Zoho CRM, Zoho unveiled Bigin - new pipeline-centric CRM that is built and priced for the needs of small and micro businesses. Bigin brings spreadsheet-like simplicity to CRM so that anyone can use the tool. You don’t need prior knowledge of CRM, or have to spend additional resources to actually make your software work. While working on the new product, we also noticed that small businesses were being taken for a ride by vendors who removed essential CRM features from their basic plans but still called it the right choice for small businesses. With features like multiple pipelines, built-in telephony, and workflow automation, Bigin contains just the right feature set to help small businesses run a full-scale customer-facing process inside their CRM. Bigin is the most affordable CRM system in the market right now, priced at $7 per month, per user, when billed annually.


2020. Zendesk’s latest tools designed to give fuller view of the customer



Two years ago Zendesk, which is widely known for its help desk software, made the move to CRM when it acquired Base. A little later that year, it announced the Sunshine platform, which customers could use to build applications on top of the Zendesk platform. It has been working to integrate the CRM tool more broadly into the platform, and today’s announcement is about giving Zendesk users a broader view of its customers. Zendesk has a great amount of data at its disposal about the customer’s likes and dislikes based on interactions with the help desk side of the house.


2020. Zendesk launches app marketplace for its CRM



Zendesk acquired Base CRM in 2018 and rebranded it as Zendesk Sell. Now the company is launching Zendesk Marketplace for Sell - an app store for this CRM product. It’s a place where companies can share components that extend the capabilities of the core Sell product. Companies like MailChimp, HubSpot and QuickBooks are available at launch. For starters, customers can build private apps with a new application development framework. This enables them to customize Sell for their particular environment, such as connecting to an internal system or building functionality that’s unique to them. In addition, ISVs can build custom apps, something Price points out they have been doing for some time on the Zendesk customer support side.


2019. Salesforce brought AI power to its search tool


Salesforce announced Einstein Search - an AI-powered search tool for Salesforce users that is designed to point them to the exact information for which they are looking. For starters, it might not know the popularity of a given topic like Google, but it can learn the behaviors of an individual and deliver the right answer based on a person’s profile, including geography and past activity to deliver a more meaningful answer. Next, it allows you to enter natural language search phrasing to find the exact information you need, and the search tool understands and delivers the results. Finally, based on what the intelligence engine knows about you, and on your search parameters, it can predict the most likely actions you want to take and provide quick action buttons in the results to help you do that, reducing the time to action.


2019. Salesforce added order management to its CRM software


Salesforce announced Lightning Order Management with integration layer that allows companies to work across sales, service and marketing systems to manage orders in a seamless way. The Salesforce solution involves a few key pieces. For starters there is order life cycle management, what Ball calls the brains of the operation. Customers start by building visual order workflows. They can move between systems in an App Picker, and the information is shared between Commerce Cloud and Service Cloud, so that as customers move from sales to service, the information moves with them and it makes it easier to process inquiries from customers about an order, including returns.


2019. Partner Management software Crossbeam got $12.5M Series A


Crossbeam, the startup that develops software for sharing information with potential partners, announced a $12.5 million Series A. The product works by sharing data from tools like Salesforce, HubSpot or even a .csv file and comparing that data inside of Crossbeam. Partners can see the overlap and where it makes sense for them to work together. Sometimes that may involve customer names, but other times it may be common sales reps across accounts. According to Crossbeam, many companies start with highly trusted partners to get comfortable with the product before branching out.


2019. Sales assistant software Vymo raised $18M


Vymo, the startup that operates an eponymous mobile-first service to help salespeople manage their leads and get more work done, has raised $18 million in a new financing round to expand its footprint in the U.S. and other markets. Vymo serves as a CRM (customer relationship management) solution and also works with other popular CRMs such as Salesforce. The service helps salespeople automatically capture their business calls, visits, messages, emails, calendar and the engagement levels to better track and manage their leads. Vymo, which employs about 100 people, has amassed over 40 enterprise customers, including life insurance firms AIA Group and AXA, in seven nations. More than 100,000 salespeople use Vymo’s service.


2019. HoneyBook, CRM for creative businesses raises $28M



HoneyBook, a customer-relationship management platform aimed at small businesses in creative fields, announced today it has raised a $28 million Series C led by Citi Ventures. This brings HoneyBook’s total raised so far to $72 million. It is using the funds to grow its teams in San Francisco and Tel Aviv and build new features for its user base, including small companies, people who work by themselves (“solopreneurs”) and freelancers. Like other CRMs, HoneyBook helps them develop relationships with potential new clients, manage projects, send invoices and accept payments, but with tools scaled for their business’ needs.


2019. Oracle adds more AI features to its suite of sales tools



Oracle adds several AI-fueled features for its suite of sales tools. For starters, the company wants to help managers and salespeople understand the market better to identify the best prospects in the pipeline. To that end, Oracle is announcing integration with DataFox, the company it purchased last fall. The acquisition gave Oracle the ability to integrate highly detailed company profiles into their Customer Experience Cloud, including information such as SEC filings, job postings, news stories and other data about the company. The company also announced an AI sales planning tool. Tarkoff says that Oracle created this tool in conjunction with its ERP team. The goal is to use machine learning to help finance make more accurate performance predictions based on internal data.


2019. Infusionsoft rebrands as Keap



Infusionsoft has rebranded the company as Keap, a name that represents the very essence of the grit and passion small businesses put in each day to keep going, keep serving and keep growing. With the rebrand, comes the launch of a new CRM product, also named Keap. Targeted at small service providers such as interior design, home repair, fitness or business consulting, Keap is smart client management software that automates repetitive sales and client-related tasks like appointment scheduling, following up on leads/quotes, and collecting payments. It does this by intelligently prompting the user when and how to follow-up with personal and professional communications that progress leads more quickly into more happy clients that refer.


2018. Zoho CRM enables to convert website live-chats to phone conversations



Zoho updated its unified customer experience platform Zoho CRM Plus. The new version doesn’t just allow your customers to reach out to you through the channel of their choice, it also helps your business teams switch across channels at will. Your sales reps can convert website live-chats to phone conversations, support agents can make or answer calls from within their ticket interface, and your marketers can convert social media interactions into tickets to get problems solved faster. With the bew ASAP plug-in for Desk plug-in, customers will be able to quickly find answers sourced from your business’s knowledge base, raise tickets directly, and even chat with your support agents from within your company website or mobile app. New Blueprint lets you build and automate processes that run across your sales, marketing, and support teams. Take your daily sales orders, for example: You can set up a Blueprint for your sales orders that involves both your sales and support teams so that approving a sales order in CRM will automatically create a ticket in Desk, and conversely, the sales order will be marked as “Delivered” in CRM when the delivery is completed in Desk.


2018. Salesforce allows to enter data to CRM via voice



Sales managers love to talk. In fact, talking is their job. But when it comes to entering customer data to CRM system, they have to type. Salesforce wants to save salespeople from such a cognitive dissonance. New feature - Einstein Voice - allows to enter data into the system using natural speech. Imagine, when getting behind the wheel, you simply launch the mobile app and talk to virtual assistant: "I just met John Smith. He is interested in buying, but asked to call him in a week ...". And the virtual assistant gently adds a note to this customer history in CRM. But Salesforce should do something with personality of their virtual assistant. It looks wrong to force Einstein to perform such simple tasks.


2018. Salesforce released new product - Customer 360



Customer 360 is a new software pulls the various customer data pieces together into a more unified view from the Salesforce product family. It is based on the technology from Salesforce's $6.5 billion Mulesoft acquisition.This should in theory allow the customer service representative talking to you on the phone to get the total picture of your interactions with the company, thereby reducing that need to repeat yourself because the information wasn’t passed on. The idea here is to bring all of the different products — sales, service, community, commerce and marketing — into a single unified view of the customer. And they allow you to do this with actually writing any code, according to the company.


2018. Microsoft launches new AI applications for Dynamics 365 CRM



A year ago Microsoft introduced its first Dynamics 365 AI solutions and today it’s expanding this portfolio with the launch of three new products: Dynamics 365 AI for Sales, Customer Service and Market Insights. Dynamics 365 AI for Sales, unsurprisingly, is meant to help sales teams get deeper insights into their prospects using sentiment analysis. That’s obviously among the most basic of machine learning applications these days, but AI for Sales also helps these salespeople understand what actions they should take next and which prospects to prioritize. Similarly, the Customer Service app focuses on using natural language understanding to understand and predict customer service problems and leverage virtual agents to lower costs. Finally, Dynamics 365 AI for Market Insights does just what the name implies: it provides teams with data about social sentiment, but this, too, goes a bit deeper.


2018. Zendesk acquired Base CRM



Zendesk has acquired Base, a startup that provides CRM for small business. While Base might not be as well known as Salesforce, Microsoft or Oracle in the CRM game, it has created a sophisticated sales force automation platform, complete with its own artificial intelligence underpinnings. If the core of customer data includes customer service, CRM and marketing, Base gives Zendesk one more of those missing components. Base was founded in 2009 and boasts more than 5,000 customers. It’s worth pointing out that Base was already available for sale in the company app marketplace, so there was some overlap here, but the company intends to try to move existing customers to Base, of course. Zendesk has indicated it will continue to support all Base customers.


2018. Salesforce simplifies phone sales



Salesforce unveiled some updates to its core Sales Cloud with an emphasis toward automation and integration. For starters, the company wants to simplify inside phone sales, giving the team not only a list of calls organized by those most likely to convert, but walking them through a sales process that’s been defined by management according to what they believe to be best practices. High Velocity Sales is designed to take underlying intelligence from Salesforce Einstein and apply it to the sales process to give sales people the best chance to convert that prospect. That includes defining contact cadence and content. For calls, the content could be as detailed as call scripts with what to say to the prospect. For emails, it could provide key details designed to move the prospect closer to sale and how often to send that next email. Once the sales teams begins to move that sale towards a close, Salesforce CPQ (configure, price, quote) capabilities come into play. That product has its roots in the company’s SteelBrick acquisition several years ago, and it too gets a shiny new update for Dreamforce this year.


2018. SAP unveiled new cloud CRM - C/4HANA



SAP gives CRM another shot with new cloud-based suite called SAP C/4HANA. It's intended to give users a way to provide consumer data protection, marketing, commerce, sales and customer service. It pulls together several acquisitions from the last several years: Hybris (ecommerce piece), Gigya (customer identity piece) amd CallidusCloud (price quote piece). SAP has taken these three pieces and packaged them together into a customer relationship management package. They see this term much more broadly than simply tracking a database of names and vital information on customers. They hope with these products to give their customers a way to provide consumer data protection, marketing, commerce, sales and customer service.


2018. Zoho's Zia learned to speak like Cortana


Zoho CRM 2018 update added voice to its AI-powered sales assistant - Zia. Zia can now interact with you through both voice and chat messages to perform any action inside Zoho CRM.  Want to know your schedule for the day? Just ask Zia. On the go and want to check if you have enough inventory of a particular product before your next customer visit? Just ask Zia. Want to quickly mark a deal as Closed-Won after hanging up with the customer? Just ask Zia to do it for you. You interact with Zia either through the voice interface in the Zoho CRM app in iPhone or Android, or through the chat bar in Zoho CRM in your desktop web browser. Recall that Microsoft embedded voice assistant Cortana into Dynamics CRM almost 3 years ago.