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Analytical CRMs are software that help you collect, manage, and analyze your data so you can forecast sales and other key metrics and better understand your customers. The best options offer robust data management, comprehensive analytics, advanced forecasting, and customizability to measure the details that matter most to your business. In this article, we compare the top analytical CRM options to help determine the one that's best for you.
Here are the top six analytical CRMs for salespeople in 2024:
Although some CRM options scored highly in one category or another, we found that Freshsales offers the best overall value for those needing a cost-effective analytical CRM. Keep reading to learn more about each CRM platform, including their primary use cases, pricing plans, and key features. Otherwise, skip down to see how we evaluated the top analytical CRM options.
Note: All per-user prices are with a one-year commitment unless otherwise noted.
Offers affordable, strong features plus upgrades for more advanced functionality like AI insights.
Price Range: Free to $69 per user, per month (21-day free trial)
Freshworks' Freshsales is a powerful sales CRM offering robust features for a reasonable price. Its most impressive analytical feature is its Freddy AI tool, which helps with predictive contact scoring, deal and forecasting insights, and more so you can use data to make decisions for each lead and deal. Also available is its sales forecasting feature, which allows you to set best-case estimates, then prioritize the activities that will likely bring about the best results.
Freshsales' forecasting and AI insights are highly useful and earned it our title as best CRM in general, but the tools and CRM are largely sales-focused. For a CRM with strong sales and marketing features, consider Zoho CRM, which offers these insights at a similar price.
Helps you understand business metrics and make the right decisions via "what-if" analyses.
Price Range: Free to $52 per user, per month (15- to 30-day free trial)
Zoho CRM is leading pipeline software great for both sales and marketing activities and data. You can analyze typical data like revenue, traffic, and trends, plus test hypothetical metrics via Zoho's "what-if" analyses. For example, if you're considering a certain discount, you can run an analysis to predict how that discount will affect your overall sales. This unique ability, in addition to Zoho's other analytics and measurement features, makes for a strong decision making tool.
Zoho's predictive analytics features are impressive, but learning about the platform can be challenging for newbies. If you’re looking for a user-friendly CRM with robust predictive analytical tools, consider Freshsales.
Provides a robust suite of core CRM features plus advanced reports and dashboards.
Price Range: $25 to $330 per user, per month (30-day trial)
Salesforce Sales Cloud is a highly customizable CRM that offers intelligent sales features and custom reporting tools that help you make decisions with real-time data. Salesforce offers template reports that you can tailor with your own CRM metrics, share with or hide from certain teams, translate into visual charts, and add to dashboards. Upgrade to its Unlimited plan to harness Einstein GPT’s generative technology, AI-driven forecasting, and sales analytics.
Salesforce’s custom reporting is unmatched, but it doesn't offer a free tier and you'll have to upgrade to a higher Sales Cloud tier to access most of the features available. For a CRM that offers lots of great sales tools even in its free plan, take a look at Freshsales.
Allows you to see which marketing channels are performing the best for your business.
Price Range: Free to $399 per month (15- to 30-day free trial)
Bitrix24 is an online workspace that helps reps and teams track their online and offline marketing campaigns. Its sales intelligence tool lets you test out different channels, such as email, SMS messaging, and robocalling, to see which one yields the most conversions. Users can also identify which social platform or Google Ads keywords generate the most traffic and monitor various offline campaigns, including local radio ads, billboards, and TV commercials.
While Bitrix24 is a great tool for your multichannel marketing efforts, its user interface can be difficult to use. For a more intuitive platform that lets you monitor your campaigns, try Freshsales, which won in this category and has campaign tracking features.
Offers enterprise-level BI and collaboration tools for faster decision making.
Price Range: $40 to $162 per user, per month (30-day free trial)
Dynamics 365 Sales is a high-powered CRM solution offered by Microsoft that helps you share, interact with, and collaborate on business intelligence (BI) reports. Dig deeper into your data with advanced data modeling and easily find patterns via forecasting and clustering tools. Users can also access a self-service option that transforms data into BI data and share these reports and insights with colleagues in resource hubs, on the web, in apps, or via Microsoft Teams.
Although Dynamics 365 Sales offers advanced BI tools for larger teams and enterprises, you need to upgrade to its higher tiers for robust features. If you need a cost-effective analytical CRM with BI tools, look into Zoho CRM.
Provides a solid base of features plus the ability to add advanced website analytics.
Price Range: $14 to $99 per user, per month (14-day trial)
Pipedrive is an easy-to-use sales CRM offering paid tiers plus a la carte upgrades. To transform it into a highly analytical CRM, use the Web Visitors add-on, which helps you closely track how your leads are finding you, how long they stayed on your website, and what they interacted with — this can improve your outbound sales by identifying the leads that are ready to buy. Users can even use Prospector within the LeadBooster add-on to find their contact info and reach out.
Pipedrive lets you pay only for what you need, but the absence of a free tier plus the expense of an add-on can get pricey. If you'd prefer to access robust sales tools in a free or low-cost tier, consider Freshsales instead.
The analytical CRMs on our list share all four of the following features:
One of the most important functions analytical CRMs offer users is the ability to store data in their database and then search and extract certain metrics into reports. This allows you to use specific data when making calculated decisions for your business.
Related to data warehousing, data mining allows users to sort through a large amount of data to discover key correlations or patterns. This helps you to understand your customers' behaviors and how best to reach and engage them.
Analytical CRMs tend to offer artificial intelligence tools that can forecast sales and other key metrics. By forecasting these numbers, you can prioritize your time for certain leads or actions.
Through the OLAP computing method offered in analytical CRMs, you can easily extract and query certain data points to analyze trends, sales, budgets, and more. This feature is great when you're planning for the short- or long-term future of your business.
To assess the best options, we first split our scoring criteria into six weighted categories, each consisting of specific subcriteria. Next, we gave each CRM software on our list a score out of five for each category, then we added up the category scores to determine a total score for each software and an overall winner among all CRMs. Finally, we considered what each software does best and assigned primary use cases.
Analytical CRMs are designed to systematically gather and analyze customer data so teams and companies can make strategic decisions based on behavior and trends. While traditional CRMs focus mainly on customer-facing processes or the operational aspects of businesses, analytical CRMs emphasize robust data analysis planning and performance management, as well as data mining tools for forecasting deals.
To determine the ideal analytical CRM for you, start by outlining your specific needs, goals, and objectives. After identifying these factors, narrow down options based on the core analytical functions they offer, customization capabilities, and scalability. Also leverage free versions or trials or browse through expert and user feedback from certified review sites to see which one aligns best with how your business operates.
The best analytical CRM platforms offer robust data management, advanced analytics features (such as customer insights and sales forecasting), OLAP tools, and flexible reports and dashboards. Analytical software solutions should also provide core CRM functionality, including contact management, pipelines, and workflow automation, as well as customization capabilities or third-party app integrations so businesses can tailor the system to their needs.
It’s nearly impossible to gain a 360-degree view of sales, marketing, and customer data without an analytical CRM solution. Not only does this software make it easy to collect, organize, process, and manage data, but each one provides unique visualizations, reports, and actionable insight to help you make the most of this information. For more information on how analytical CRMs compare to the other main CRM types, check out our article on the four types of CRMs.
This article was written by J.R. Johnivan and updated by Kezia Jungco.
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