About Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring)
Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring) pricing
Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring) does not have a free version but does offer a free trial. Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring) paid version starts at US$449.00/month.
Alternatives to Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring)
OBI Brand Monitor
Blueshift
Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring) Reviews
Feature rating
- Industry: Marketing & Advertising
- Company size: 2–10 Employees
- Used Daily for 1-5 months
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Review Source
SharpSpring Marketing Automation
SharpSpring has a very quick implementation process and is very easy to learn. Within the first 30 days of having SharpSpring we already ran 2 separate email campaigns for 2 separate clients. Their representatives check in with us frequently so we never feel like we're on our own. Our next challenge will be selling SharpSpring to prospects/clients.
Pros
The amazing customer support that is offered. Anytime I have a question I can either look it up myself in their library of resources with tutorials and instructional videos, or I can call their partner support line and speak to a real person who even follows up after the call to make sure all of the needs were met.
Cons
I wish you could edit Life of Lead to be able to put custom events in there. We uploaded a prospect database we had been tracking since 2017 and it had every time we touched a prospect. Unfortunately, once we uploaded this list into SharpSpring we were not able to edit their Life of Lead prior to the upload date. While this is barely an issue, it would be nice to see how long we have been tracking some of these prospects to give us a better prediction at how many touches it takes for a prospect to convert to a customer.
Alternatives Considered
Lead ForensicsReasons for Switching to Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring)
SharpSpring seemed like the best deal on the market by far. For only a few hundred dollars a month we were able to start using our first marketing automation/CRM software. With SharpSpring you are able to cut off using other services, so we are actually paying less than we did before, but getting so much more in return!
- Industry: Marketing & Advertising
- Company size: 11–50 Employees
- Used Daily for 6-12 months
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Review Source
A powerful platform, but still has a long way to go
We use Sharpspring for email automation, marketing automation, lead tracking, reporting, as a CRM, and as a sales tool. It allows us to track contact interactions from first touchpoint through sale. It has been a huge help.
Pros
My favorite thing about Sharpspring is the ability to track and analyze the entire life of a lead, from start to finish. It allows us to optimize our funnels and nurture prospects from interest to sale. It is a really powerful tool and offers (almost) everything you need for marketing automation from automated workflows to landing pages and forms to email design. I also love their lead scoring.
Cons
Though it offers a lot of features, it's not all that usable compared to similar products. There are countless small usability issues. Landing pages are pretty difficult to create. Support is usually great – but can at times be entirely unhelpful. Automation has some key features other tools allow. Overall, there are just a lot of features that still need to be added in order to really compete.
Reasons for Choosing Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring)
Price was the primary reason.Switched From
HubSpot Marketing HubReasons for Switching to Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring)
We really needed a robust CRM for longer B2B buying cycles. Though all other tools were awesome, Sharpspring won out there.- Industry: Logistics & Supply Chain
- Company size: 11–50 Employees
- Used Daily for 1-5 months
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Review Source
Review
Started out fine until we realized that all the report data within SharpSpring was false. We understand that data accountability is an issue in the marketing automation industry as a whole, but SharpSpring is especially terrible at this. The fact that upper management in IT recognizes that email report data is different between what's in SharpSpring email reports, what's in SharpSpring Life Of The Lead, and what's in the exported email report excel list and subsequently admits that none of it is entirely correct is beyond me. The software is meant to provide genuinely insightful feedback to track user activity and potential conversions, however, the development team.
Pros
Marketing automation features are very helpful.
Cons
- There is no escalation process for customer support requests that are above a customer support reps expertise
- Email report data is BS and one of the heads of IT at SharpSpring admitted it. The report data within SS differs from the data exported; the excel file has duplicate headline titles with different meanings/data; email data is shit - we sent test emails internally and didn't open them and it shows we opened them 3 times in SS and 4 times in the exported report
- Life of the Lead is the most valuable data within SS and yet you cannot automate based on any of it
- Life Of The Lead duplicates email "opens" and "clicks" based on how many people are in the chain, giving a false view of engagement from customers
- Email clicks are a load of BS - it shows that emails were opened and every link clicked within 10 seconds of sending because of spam bots/filters. SharpSpring doesn't filter this data out, so we can't tell the difference between what's real and what's not. "Can't we export the excel sheet and do that filtering ourselves?" Nope - as stated before, one of the head IT guys at SharpSpring validated our concerns that the excel email report is indeed, shit data. None of it is usable
- Rather than creating a backlog of needed updates and releasing them as a batch update on non-business-hours, SharpSpring product development teams push updates during work hours, breaking crucial functionality for 3+ hours/week, leaving our sales staff twiddling thumbs and complaining.
Response from Constant Contact
Chris, we're so sorry to hear about the experience and issues you've had with SharpSpring. We thoroughly appreciate that you have expressed specific concerns and hopefully we have the opportunity to regain your trust. I know the team is actively looking into these issues, but if there's anything additional we can do in the meantime, please feel free to reach out to us at [email protected].
- Industry: Computer Software
- Company size: 201–500 Employees
- Used Daily for 1+ year
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Review Source
A better option to Hubspot and other Marketing Automation solutions
We like the platform as we can track online and email interactions with prospects, customers and partners. This helps us with qualifying lead generation and tracking the stickiness of campaigns. The training of SharpSpring was challenging but we were able to muddle through and figure out a lot of stuff on our own. Customer support has also been great when they are able to help with issues that may arise.
Pros
We like the fact it is much cheaper in cost as compared to HubSpot and other marketing automation platforms. The ease of using the platform has made it easy to early adoption of the end users and we are able to fully track our MQL and ROI.
Cons
SharpSpring has an extremely high demand on email accuracy rate of 98% so quite often we get suspended due to bounced back emails. Sometimes it is difficult to have an almost 100% list when people leave companies. We have as a solution, pay for 3rd party email checker services,to help mitigate this and we also send a larger portion of emails though mailchimp.
Reasons for Choosing Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring)
We wanted to have a solution that could do more analytics and tracking on engagement. SharpSpring was able to do this.Reasons for Switching to Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring)
cost, no locked in contract, larger user base capability and ease of use
- Industry: Marketing & Advertising
- Company size: 2–10 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
Sharpspring the most complete marketing automation software you can get in this price range!
We use this software for the "marketing automation" catch leads and convert them to customers (for us but also our custumers). I have been using other tools and they tend to be FAR to big and overwhelming.
So my experience is that i can easy train others to use SharpSpring and let marketing and sales work together in the tool and with the tool.
Pros
- Price
- Easy of use
- Easy to implement and learn
- Fast support
- Active community and many updates
- Possible to have skype calls and team sessions with SharpSpring to spar.
Cons
- The Social Media part in the software is not optimal, we still use other software next to it.
- CRM feature is small, great for small companies, but bigger ones can come short.
