Recently updated on February 7th, 2023 at 03:10 pm
Customer relationship management software or CRM software is relevant to many businesses nowadays. With the rise in virtual assistant business and the reliance on virtual assistants, the right CRM tools are no longer a luxury but a necessity for marketing and sales teams to simplify business processes and streamline business operations.
When virtual assistants are not in one place, you need software that keeps everything in one place. Let’s explain CRM for virtual assistants, the advantages of a CRM system, and a review of the best virtual assistant CRM when it comes to CRM tools, descriptions, features, benefits, and pricing.
What is CRM for Virtual Assistants?
Virtual assistants help businesses by managing schedules and administrative tasks. They process customer requests and help your business run efficiently. Virtual assistants work remotely. Using software to help them keep track of all data across remote teams is indispensable. Here’s why using CRM for virtual assistants is necessary.
Customer relationship management, or CRM data management, is a technology that helps small businesses or large businesses handle customer data by organizing it so companies can keep track of their client communication. CRM solutions include managing the client database to keep track of current and potential customers. They also include setting up automated workflows between sales teams and generating sales leads.
CRM for virtual assistants helps businesses run work processes more efficiently because a single platform is used to manage data, which leads to fewer communication problems and leaves no room for errors.
Why Do Virtual Assistants Need CRM?
Virtual assistants can perform many tasks like managing social media accounts, performing administrative tasks like sending follow-up emails, leading marketing campaigns, and being part of marketing teams and the sales process.
A CRM tool can help virtual assistants with time-consuming duties like managing client relationships, collecting client information, generating custom reports, keeping track of the sales funnel, and tracking time spent on tasks.
Virtual assistant CRM tools make many work processes more manageable. The CRM software keeps data for marketing automation, social media management, and other tasks.
Advantages of a CRM for Virtual Assistants
CRM software has various advantages for virtual assistants. Let’s see some of the common benefits of CRM software.
Automation
Automation is one of the main features of CRM platforms. It’s the reason why CRM software is so popular. Why would anyone spend hours on various tasks if the CRM software can handle them faster and more efficiently? Automation means you can assign your most repetitive, time-consuming, and yet relevant work to the CRM software.
The automation includes call scheduling, assigning qualified leads, AI chatbots for customer service, and marketing automation tools like email marketing campaigns. Automation helps businesses save time by letting companies focus on more efficient tasks. Regardless of your company size, all businesses can benefit from automation.
Metrics
To be always on top of your business goals, you must always keep an eye on metrics. Measuring your company’s goals and the performance of your team members is a must. It is your way of finding whether or not you are on the right track.
You can use your CRM tool to track the sales cycle length, the customer retention cost, the customer churn, and the net promoter score. You can also measure the performance of your sales team: virtual assistants or those working from the office. You can easily track data with your CRM tool because all the data you need to make the right business decisions is available.
Easily Accessible Data
Collecting data and keeping it in one place is excellent for businesses because then you can keep track of all your customer data through integrated apps or messaging platforms and get an analytics dashboard too. When data is in one place, businesses can make better decisions.
Integration
CRM platforms offer integrations. The ability to integrate currently used applications, software, and tools with the CRM platform your business uses is no longer a luxury. It is a necessity. No software or tool lives in isolation, and being able to bring together all your work data from various platforms to only one platform is a superpower your business needs. Integrations make it easier to keep track of your sales data and make completing your business tasks easy.
Integrations include email integrations like Gmail or Outlook, calendar integrations, calling software integrations like zoom, integrations with eCommerce platforms like Shopify, and integrations with platforms like Stripe that manage online payments.
Best CRM Software for Virtual Assistants
Various CRM platforms provide CRM services suitable for virtual assistants. Their features and benefits differ as well as their pricing. In this section, we’ll cover the well-known CRM software for virtual assistants so business owners can decide on the best CRM tool for their business efficiency and success. Let’s get started.
Salesforce CRM
When anyone mentions CRM, most would think of Salesforce. It’s a well-known CRM platform that offers many services for businesses. Salesforce has been around since 1999.
It helps several industries like consumer goods, retail, healthcare, education, and many more by providing many products like automation, revenue optimizations, analytics for business, and integrations.
Features
Salesforce features listed below cover several products and industries and differ according to the package you choose:
- Intelligence Ecommerce Marketing Insights
- B2B Commerce and B2B2C Enhancements
- Customer Self-Service
- API Integration Suite
- Order Management Analytics
- Sentiment Insights
- Easy Scheduling
- Einstein Discovery: Live Predictions on Snowflake
Pricing
- The four small business packages start at $25 per user per month to $1250 (free trial available)
- The four sales packages start at $25 per user per month to $300 with a free trial option.
- Pricing for the marketing cloud for the customer data platform starts at $12500 and can reach $65000 for enterprise plus.
Hubspot CRM
Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah founded Hubspot when they “noticed a shift in how people shop and buy.” Hubspot’s mission is to help businesses grow.
Hubspot’s CRM platform has everything businesses need: marketing solutions and customer service solutions. All Hubspot products are powerful, and they are more relevant when combined.
Features
The listed features are from all the products of Hubspot CRM.
- Drag-and-drop editor, recommendations for SEO, and themes for the website
- Customer feedback, Knowledge base, and Lead generation
- Marketing automation, Analytics, and advanced CRM
- Scheduling meetings and payments.
Pricing
- Hubspot offers several free tools: marketing, sales, and content management as email marketing, conversational bots, and mobile optimization.
- Three Marketing Hub packages start at $45 per month and can reach $3600 per month.
- Both sales and customer services packages are the same in pricing, starting at $45 per month and reaching $1200 per month.
- As for the bundles (combining all products), they start at $45 and reach $5000 per month.
- You can use CRM free tools or get a demo for the premium version.
Zoho CRM
More than 80 million users trust Zoha, and among their users are Facebook, Amazon, and HP. Zoho believes in the power of software, and its mission is to “create beautiful software to solve business problems.”
Features
- Zoho Creator can help businesses build tools that are suitable for their business needs.
- Integrate and pull data from various apps to have a clear view to help you make business decisions
- Zoho tools can help you collect data, send emails, update CRM, and manage payment transactions.
- Collecting data and generating data models
- Analytics and data visualization tools
Pricing
- Zoho offers 15 days as a free trial
- Zoho’s Professional plan costs $25 per user per month
- Zoho’s Ultimate plan costs $400 per month for ten users
- Zoho offers some tools completely for free with limited users and features
Pipedrive
Pipedrive was founded in 2010, and by 2021, it has become the no.1 highest-rated CRM by TrustRadius. Pipedrive’s success equation is pretty simple: start with the pipeline stages, focus on sales, track progress, then optimize.
Their platform helps businesses grow by offering several products like a sales software, email software, and integrations. They also offer various plans for different business needs.
Features
- Over 350+ integrations with apps and tools like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Asana, and Slack.
- Automating repetitive administrative tasks.
- Insights and reports so that businesses can track performance and business goals.
Pricing
- Pipedrive offers a 14-day free trial for all available plans
- Pipedrive offers four plans starting at $9.90 per user per month and can reach $59.90 per user per month
Freshworks
Freshworks offers software that is “affordable, quick to implement, and designed for the end-user.” There are more than 50000 companies that use Freshsales’ software solutions. FreshSales has been around since 2010.
Features
- Analytics that you can customize based on your business needs
- Excellent tools for better team collaboration
- Tools to enable you to collect your customer data and keep it all in one place
- Multiple messaging channels so you can engage with your customers
- You can enhance your customer support experience using Freshworks’ Freddy AI
Pricing
- Free trial available for all Freshworks products and solutions
- Freshworks offers free plans for all its products like Freshdesk, Freshchat, Freshsales, Freshservice, Freshmarketer, and Freshteam.
- Pricing depends on the service, but most services are within this range (0- $299) starting at that amount billed annually, and package pricing is per employee-agent per month.
How Do I Choose the Best CRM Tool for my Virtual Assistant?
Cost
It all comes down to the money you’re willing to pay and can pay for the CRM tool. Does the CRM tool offer a free, reliable version you can use? Or is there a CRM tool that offers great value at a lower price that you can use for your business, especially if it’s a small business?
Features and Benefits
Yes, it depends on what you need from the CRM tool. The features and benefits can help you make up your mind. Although most CRM tools offer similar services and features, some services are unique. Think about your business needs and the needs of your virtual assistant team.
Ease of Set Up and Use
The perfect tool has to be easy to set up and use. After all, you’re using a CRM tool to make your life easier, not more difficult. A free trial would be best to check if this is the best CRM tool for your business.
Integration with your Tools
The best CRM for virtual assistants and businesses alike is the one that best integrates with the tools you already use. The CRM tool you choose will probably integrate with the applications and software you use, but it’s always a great idea to check before you decide to use the service.
Is There a Free CRM?
Some CRM platforms offer a free plan where you get either a package for free or some tools for free, but if you want to get great service and value from a CRM tool, a paid version is your best bet. From the service providers out there, it’s not difficult to get great value for the lowest price.
Experimenting is key. You can always experiment with free services and a free trial before you move on to the premium version, and who knows, if you are a small business owner, the free plan or tools might be enough for now.
In conclusion
CRM tools are great for collecting data from multiple platforms and organizing it. Also, automating repetitive tasks gets so much easier with CRM. CRM is also great for collaboration between team members and is a great way to engage with and understand your customers.
CRM tools can help team members, especially virtual assistants who work remotely, as it keeps data in one place and keeps everything organized. As a result, CRM tools offer great value, and you get a greater value when you choose the right tool for your business.
We hope you enjoyed this article. If so, you might enjoy these resources:
- Most in Demand Virtual Assistant Jobs & Services
- How Much Does CRM Software Cost?
- Best CRM for hotels & hospitality CRM software
- 14 Best Real Estate CRM Software
- Your Guide to the Best Recruitment CRM Software
- Best Mortgage CRM Software Solutions
- 12 Best Nonprofit CRM Software
- Guide to Choosing the Best Insurance CRM Software
