As we grow into the digital age, the offerings that exist for businesses to manage their operations and sales funnels grow exponentially by the day. We know it can be overwhelming to determine which ones you need and which ones you don’t – or if you need any at all, which is why we wanted to highlight some of the major players in the market and give an overview of their features.

The add-ons available depend on your choice of CRM system – for the purpose of this article, we will focus on the two most common platforms, Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics. We researched third party applications and determined the top three considering their features and user-rankings.

Salesforce

1. Marketo Marketing Automation Platform. This platform allows you to integrate your marketing efforts with your CRM data. The alternative is time consuming and prone to human error because it requires that the user extract client information leveraged from CRM sourced Data Lists and drop it into a marketing platform. Marketo supports seamless integration with bonus features such as reporting, tracking and follow-up capabilities.
2. Informatica Cloud. This SaaS based tool is admin focused – it utilizes connectors that allow the user to synchronize on-premises information with cloud based information like Salesforce data. This includes anything from ERP to internal databases.
3. Adobe EchoSign. This application allows for enterprise document management that is integrated with Salesforce. It provides the ability for users to view, edit, track, approve, sign and store documents across platforms.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM

1. CRM-Project 4th Module. This project management tool integrates itself with Dynamics and provides end to end project management capabilities within the CRM system. It allows for collaboration, tracking and updates to be made by all relevant users.
2. Click Dimensions Marketing Automation. Click Dimensions is the preferred marketing automation tool for Dynamics. It offers the ability to share data easily and utilize the information to prioritize leads.
3. Assistance Professional Services Automation. This system is focused on integrating resource planning into the CRM system and is targeted towards information workers. This multifaceted system integrates Dynamics CRM and ERP platforms to facilitate tasks like contract management and invoicing, among other things.

Hopefully this post gives you some insight into the most popular add-ons for your CRM System. We only viewed a very small subset of the paid applications that you can leverage. There are a lot of free ones as well and most applications offer free trials.

Have you found a particularly helpful CRM application that supports your business? We would love to hear about it! Need help boosting your CRM database? Contact us for a free consultation!