Read our independent editorial review of the best contact management software for salespeople, including the best use cases for each option.
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 2022:
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.
Note: All per-user prices require a one-year commitment unless otherwise noted.
Overall, Freshsales offers the best combination of analytical features and pricing out of all the entries. It also earned the highest scores for analytical features, sales features, and our expert score. Take a look at our breakdown for specific details on all CRMs that made our list.
Sales-focused CRM offering 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. If you're looking for a CRM with strong sales and marketing features, consider Zoho CRM, which offers these insights at a similar price.
Sales CRM under the Salesforce Sales Cloud umbrella that offers core features plus advanced reports and dashboards.
Price Range: $25 per user, per month (14-day free trial)
Salesforce Essentials is the most affordable Sales Cloud level but still carries much of the power that you'd expect from Salesforce, especially when it comes to custom analytical reporting. Essentials offers template reports that you can customize with your own CRM metrics, share with or hide from certain teams, translate into visual charts, and add to dashboards. This allows the right people to view the reports and make decisions based on real-time data.
Essentials' 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.
Sales and marketing platform that helps users 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 an analytical CRM 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 functionality makes for a strong decision making tool.
Zoho's sales and marketing features are impressive, but many are only available in the paid plans. For a CRM that offers more robust free sales, marketing, and service tools, learn about HubSpot CRM.
Free forever CRM that allows you to see which marketing channels are performing the best for your business.
Price Range: Free to $1,200 per month (Sales Hub)
HubSpot CRM is a full-scale free solution for marketing, sales, and service with available upgrades. With the leading free version, auto-build standard dashboards in your account to analyze your marketing channels — your website, landing pages, blog posts, CTAs, emails, social accounts, and more. Once you understand each channel's sessions, conversion rates, and other key performance metrics, you can decide how best to allocate your resources.
HubSpot CRM includes most core features you'll need, but upgrading is expensive since you pay separately for Sales Hub and Marketing Hub to upgrade both sets of tools. To get both types of premium features in one package, start with Zoho CRM's free version and upgrade as needed.
Visual sales platform with a solid base of features plus the ability to add advanced website analytics.
Price Range: $14.90 to $99 per user, per month + add-ons (14-day free 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. Then, you 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.
Project management and sales platform that comes with prebuilt dashboards to show real-time project analytics.
Price Range: Free to $99 per user, per month (14-day free trial)
Insightly is a sales and project management CRM that uses separate pipelines for leads and projects. The most unique analytical tool offered by Insightly is its real-time projects dashboard. When you create an account, the platform will automatically generate a visual dashboard of four project-related reports — project pipeline funnel, projects by status, projects by rep and status, and projects completed by month — so you can analyze progress and improve delivery times.
Insightly is great for users that need both sales and project management, but it can seem clunky compared to other CRMs. If you're mainly focused on sales, it might be best to go with a more user-friendly sales CRM like Freshsales.
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 its 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 on certain leads or actions.
Through the OLAP computing method offered in analytical CRMs, you can easy 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.
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.
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