Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring) Reviews

Pros

The ability to create a clear sales funnel and track your client through the sales process is really easy and highlights areas where more work and focus might be needed in your sales process.

There is a ton of features to engage users and build your audience, you just need to spend time and be open to exploring ideas.

Implementing dynamic content which changes depending on the customer persona is cool.

The support team always reply same day, there is online chat (US times) too.

Cons

There are some definite bugs such as data fields 'locking' when creating a landing page and the later it becomes editable again. Strangely the design side of emails and landing pages is not cohesive. So you have a limited range of fonts in forms but lots of customisation for colours for headings, then the reverse for landing pages. Thinks like buttons for GDPR can't currently be customised which looks odd.

Also, the onboarding process for Squarespace websites is different and this is not mentioned anywhere.

Just needs to have someone invest some time to deal with all these issues and implement a decent upgrade.

Generally, all very minor things but stacked up can provide a bit more challenging onboarding process than what it needs to be.

Alternatives Considered

HubSpot Marketing Hub and Marketo Engage

Reasons for Switching to Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring)

Cost, ease of use of platform and the support.

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.

Alternatives Considered

ActiveCampaign, BenchmarkONE and Keap

Reasons for Choosing Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring)

Price was the primary reason.

Switched From

HubSpot Marketing Hub

Reasons 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.

Pros

Seemed like a great and more affordable option compared to HubSpot. Not much else to say here since we had a boat load of issues with it.

Cons

Everything was cumbersome. From onboarding to implementation. Even getting someone on the phone from the right department to help us when we had issues with email was a problem. Overall, really clunky and outdated. We ended up going to Hubspot and it's SO much better and not even that much more expensive especially when we think of all of the time we all wasted trying to get sharpspring to work.

Alternatives Considered

HubSpot Marketing Hub

Switched From

HubSpot Marketing Hub

Reasons for Switching to Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring)

price.

Pros

SharpSpring has features to create marketing operations and track those campaigns either manually or automatically. Considering I can tie all the potential avenues of a campaign into one spot and see how users interact with is a great win. At a glance, it is essential to read the data and make the right decisions; SharpSpring brings all the data to one platform. It makes work more enjoyable that we can create a single campaign with a list of contacts, email templates, unique forms, dynamic pages, trackable media, automation, and analytics in one spot. Not to mention, once we create this base campaign and all its numerous pieces, I can then quickly use all the parts as a template to do another or a third, and so on. Making it very efficient over time. SharpSpring has a lot of features, but I am thrilled with our CRM, email marketing, ads, funnels, all in one location. All this and the support team have been top-notch every step of the way. I also like to learn myself, which they provide via courses, updated videos, and documents that my team and I can reference.

Cons

Interface and design consistency are my two significant cons for this platform. Like most, once you know the platform and its interface, you can be very successful. No difference here except that the design process between creating emails, pages, and forms all have their unique process. I believe it would improve user efficiency if the page and email creator, for instance, had a standard procedure and the same layout of tools. The platform has a lot of features with more coming, so you have to know where all the pieces are between the settings, marketing, and sales menu layout.

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.

Alternatives Considered

HubSpot Marketing Hub, Dynamics 365 and Marketo Engage

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.

Switched From

HubSpot Marketing Hub, Dynamics 365 and Marketo Engage

Reasons for Switching to Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring)

cost, no locked in contract, larger user base capability and ease of use

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 Forensics

Reasons 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!

Pros

SharpSpring is a game-changer! Getting an all-in-one platform that allows us to go from capturing lead information and behavior all the way through to identifying qualified leads through marketing campaigns is amazing. Having one place for marketing emails, landing pages, social media, blogging, meetings, video chats, and more is almost unheard of. Match that with a really robust CRM that tracks leads, beautifully outlines the life of a lead, and allows you to easily manage the sales pipeline and one-on-one engagements with pre-qualified leads with lead scoring is amazing.

Cons

Seriously, there isn't much negative to say about this platform. The onboarding was amazing, the self-guided trainings were awesome, it's a great platform. The only downside is it's not as "pretty" as some platform, but hey, I'd rather have a functioning product helping me make more money and something pretty to look at.

Pros

What I like most about SharpSpring is how much you get for the money. It packs every feature you'd expect from the expensive marketing automation platforms but doesn't throw exorbitant costs on those features. I also like the ease of integration with other platforms.

Cons

I highly dislike the recent shift in having clients pay for their own accounts with separate billing. We were sold this platform as one we could completely white-label for clients, but now we are required to put a client CC on file.

Alternatives Considered

HubSpot Marketing Hub

Reasons for Switching to Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring)

We chose SharpSpring solely because it was cheaper than HubSpot.

Pros

SharpSpring provides all necessary features for successful marketing automation while being affordable.

Cons

The Visitor ID system is not working outside of the US. I am based in Europe.

Alternatives Considered

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement and Salesforce Sales Cloud

Switched From

Copper

Reasons for Switching to Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring)

SharpSpring has all the important features and is much more affordable.

Pros

I really like that they are constantly innovating, adding new features and functionalities. I also think that having great support, right here in the U.S. is one of the most important things they offer.

Cons

Currently, their data is not easily integrated with my reporting tool TapClicks.

Alternatives Considered

Freshmarketer

Reasons for Choosing Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring)

insufficient features, no integration with CRM

Switched From

Mailchimp

Reasons for Switching to Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring)

ability to build landing pages, schedule social posts, social listening and superior automation workflows

Pros

Everything you need to grow a business is in one place. The interface is easy to use and very intuitive. However, my favorite part of the company is the awesome support staff! Migrating from another platform, there is always a learning curve and workflow adjustment. If there was something we didn't know how to achieve in SharpSpring their friendly staff would explain with great detail how to get it done and integrate into the workflow we created.

Cons

Their social posting, responding section of the software is still a bit weak and we do utilize another piece of software to get this done, but we remember their software is about the automation and converting leads to customers and it does that very well, so this is an easy area to compromise.

Alternatives Considered

HubSpot Marketing Hub

Reasons for Choosing Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring)

The price point was the biggest initial reason. We moved from another large product that pieced everything together making it out of reach for the smaller businesses. SharpSpring has all the major pieces as one at a lower cost. Had I known about the great customer service... I would have moved over a long time ago!

Switched From

HubSpot Sales Hub

Reasons for Switching to Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring)

Price Price Price.... and now... Service Service Service!!!!! They really care about my business doing well and help with non-product related questions. As I mentioned prior, they go above and beyond!

Pros

1. Customer service is highly responsive.
2. Templates for emails and landing pages are easy to use without design or development expertise.
3. Incredibly easy to customize: add fields, pipelines, dashboards, automations particular to your processes without coding or other specialized knowledge.

Cons

1. Landing page builder is kind of basic. However, new releases come regularly and is probably not a big deal if you have an html developer handy.
2. Integrated social scheduler functionality is a bit basic.
3. If you have significant custom complex report needs, this is not the platform for you. They have great canned reports that any layman can find value in, you can download csv files of many things, and you can customize a dashboard with report "widgets." But not a lot of ability to dig into raw data.

Alternatives Considered

HubSpot Marketing Hub, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement and Salesforce Sales Cloud

Reasons for Choosing Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring)

Creating additional sales pipelines required an upgrade to another Salesforce product. For the B2B tech startups our agency served, Salesforce was already a bit much for what they needed -- even before adding on needed marketing automation platforms like Marketo or Pardot. They just didn't have the dedicated resources needed for managing those complex systems.

Switched From

Salesforce Sales Cloud

Reasons for Switching to Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring)

1. SharpSpring's unlimited user model was a big plus for my clients. No need to get in touch with Sales and create a contract addendum. Takes 60 seconds to add a new user. 2. From the agency perspective, being able to manage multiple client instances from a single platform made it easy for my small team to administer. 3. The all-in-one platform makes it easy to connect marketing to sales to upsells for a complete view of the customer experience. 4. Adding a new field to the contact record or a new pipeline is super simple. No development or platform expertise needed. A huge bonus, especially when these requests turn out to be of negligible value and/or rarely used.

Pros

SharpSpring has a comprehensive range of tools to help you get the most from Marketing Automation. It integrates with your website easily and can track visitors to your site from all your differing campaigns. The tools are easy to use, once you have been through the training and can be manipulated to work together to suit your business. Delivering insights and analytics to help you tweak your marketing and increase your ROI.

Cons

The software is comprehensive, so there is a learning curve. You can get started easily with it, but you have to continue to learn to get the real powerful insights from it. Setting up takes quite a lot of tweaking to get the results you need, but it is simple and powerful to use and delivers results right from the get go.

Alternatives Considered

HubSpot Marketing Hub

Reasons for Switching to Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring)

We found SharpSpring to be of better value overall and fitted our business needs.

Pros

Ease-of-use: SharpSpring is very user-friendly and intuitive. It's easy to edit or create an email, set up workflows, and navigate around the platform.
Versatile: SharpSpring is an all-in-one tool that you can use for your email program, sales pipeline, CRM, marketing automation, and social media.
Customer service: I often frequent the online help center that has a lot of easy-to-understand solutions to many questions that come up. If this doesn't solve the issue, tech support is very responsive and the account management team is also very accommodating.

Cons

Reporting: There are some basic reports that you can pull from the data in SharpSpring, but I would love to see some more robust reporting overall, especially with the sales feature. Aggregated reports across multiple pipelines, for example, would be great to have access to.
Customer segmentation: The platform could use a bit more in-depth customer segmentation features. I sometimes feel the list-building is not as intuitive as it could be.

Alternatives Considered

Campaign Monitor and Delivra

Reasons for Choosing Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring)

We were looking for a more agile, better UI product for our Marketing Automation/Email Marketing program.

Switched From

Campaign Monitor and Delivra

Reasons for Switching to Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring)

Of the alternate products, SharpSpring was the best fit for our needs in the organization and we felt we could utilize this tool well. The pricing model was also the most straightforward and matched our needs the best.

Pros

SharpSpring is extremely user friendly. It allows for automation through the entire sales funnel. From its Social Media capabilities to its impactful email marketing feature, SharpSpring improves our productivity from management to rep usage!

Cons

In doing research, there was supposed to be an automatic integration with Qwilr. We have found that is not the case.

Alternatives Considered

Zoho CRM, Salesforce Sales Cloud and HubSpot CRM

Reasons for Choosing Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring)

SharpSpring was easier to use and allowed our agency to "White label" the solution to our clients.

Switched From

Pipedrive

Pros

I love the way the tracking is displayed on a timeline so you can see everywhere a prospect went. The built-in CRM and sales funnel pics up where the marketing funnel leaves off and keeps the automation going during and after the sale to upset and resell. The new retargeting and (soon to be) advertising feature is amazing, not only retargeting your visitors but it finds similar customers to target. Overrall, it's really intuitive and easy to use, and I've used many marketing automation platforms over the years. This is the least expensive. No long-term contracts to sign but still has all the features of the much more expensive ones. And the LiveChat feature you can put on your Web site that was just added (at no additional cost) brings a huge feature that other companies charge more than the entire cost of the SharpSpring subscription.

Cons

No complaints at all. The learning curve wasn't very steep and the price is right. They even have evening support hours.

Pros

First, fantastic price. Personalization can drive amazing results. SharpSpring gives you a solid set of tools that all communicate with each other flawlessly and for an exceptional value. It's a sophisticated tool with a lot of depth, but the certifications, demos, videos, tools, customer service all make it very easy to use. Just when I think I've figured out the edge of the depth on the tool, I realize there's another level. The automation is top notch. The ability to track so many actions, behaviors and then to take action to help the customer go further along the funnel. It fulfills the needs of so many other tools - HootSuite, Sprout, Calendly, Mailchimp, CRM, Sales CRM, TypeForm, and WhoIsVisiting (to name a few).

Cons

Not a lot so far. I'll always take more templates, pre-made content. Don't get me wrong, it has content, but the more the merrier.Billing can be a little confusing, but I know they have an update coming very soon. In fact, I just received an update email about it. I'd love to see more progress on the SharpSpring iOS app.

Alternatives Considered

HubSpot Marketing Hub, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, Mailchimp and Marketo Engage

Reasons for Switching to Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring)

I've worked with HubSpot, Adobe, Marketo, Pardot and a myriad of other digital marketing tools. I've used tools that cost 1-2 million a year, spent months on integrations. I've honestly never found a tool that is so capable, so easy to implement, and does not require 6 figures of budget to fund it as I have in SharpSpring. I think SharpSpring is a no-brainer tool for any small to medium sized organization. It may even cut it for larger organizations. While I'm very impressed, I see the company continuing to strive towards an even higher level of greatness.

Pros

Sharpspring has an easy interface and do a great integration between marketing automation and CRM, helping these teams to work without any gaps, fully integrated. Reports are very easy to generate and personalize.

Cons

The Email designer and Landing Pages Designer is not the ideal yet, is a little difficult to use.
Other problem is the incapacity to separate invoices and charges to my clients in Brasil. I need to receive from my clients separately and pay for all Sharpspring licences.

Alternatives Considered

Salesforce Sales Cloud and RD Station

Reasons for Choosing Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring)

Sharpspring is better and have a complete solution.

Switched From

RD Station

Reasons for Switching to Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring)

Because it offers all tools I need in one.

Pros

It was very quick to deploy, fast to get my team trained, and effective in demonstrating results for clients.

In addition, the feature functionality vs. price balance is fantastic. Other tools have lots of bloatware and tools that you will never use.

Cons

I wish it had some built-in SEO tools and I wish their email list management was more forgiving on spam traps.

Alternatives Considered

HubSpot Marketing Hub, Pipedrive and Marketo Engage

Reasons for Choosing Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring)

Cost and HubSpot's lack of flexibility.

Switched From

HubSpot Marketing Hub

Reasons for Switching to Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring)

It was a combination of feature vs. price. In addition, SharpSpring was much easier to use and get operational quickly.

Pros

It is a platform that cover the manage of the commercial proccess and the use of information from the salers, this feed our Marketing Strategies and give us a continous improvement. Is easy to share tools between commercial and marketing teams about new campaings and we can obtain all the data to support, if a campaing was succesfully with a ROI that has the detail of each lead, opportunity and sales earned.

Cons

There is not automation proccess to include automatically changes in account's flelds. Sharpspring is working constantly in improving features, that is why we do not worry.

Pros

The SharpSpring Marketing Automation Software provides the following features and benefits that make it a stand out product for my business;
1. The 24/7 support incorporated into the monthly fees; Ensuring no surprises down the line.
2. No requirement to pay fees annually upfront.
3. New landing page feature.
4. Blog page feature.
5. New integration with the Litmus test.
6. Link up with Zapier integration to allow connection to hundreds of 3rd party software providers with the Zapier integration and SharpSpring APIs.
7. Training platform library; In-depth and with video availability to walk through processes. This along with 24/7 support, in my opinion, are the two most important features out with cost of course which set SharpSpring apart as the right platform for our boutique digital marketing agency.

Cons

1. Monthly fees in dollars do not convert via local UK sterling currency rates, unlike other US marketing software providers. You pay in £ sterling the same monthly fee as in US $ dollars.
2. Email builder while it is satisfactory it could be even more user friendly.

Pros

The biggest benefit of SharpSpring is having visibility into the leads we generate. In the past we could see impressions and clicks and website visits from our campaigns. Now we are seeing the actual leads and being able to follow activity after the initial contact. The added visibility has been an absolute game changer in the value we can provide our clients.

I really like the Life of the Lead feature where once you have a lead in the system you can track all their activity in great detail, seeing when they came back to the website, what pages they went to, if they opened emails, etc.

We've even had instances where clients claimed they were not getting leads from our campaigns and once SharpSpring was installed, not only could we now provide reports of leads we were generating, but we caught a hole in their customer service where leads we were providing were not getting responses from scheduling staff. So we not only provided reports of the leads we generated, but helped close a gap in a serious customer service issue that was happening.

Cons

It takes quite a bit of effort to get up to speed on SharpSpring as there are a lot of moving parts. But their support is great and always gets back to us quickly and efficiently to keep us on track.

Pros

SharpSpring is a sleek system that offers outstanding tools for marketing automation. We researched a lot of platforms ranging from free to $1000s before going with SharpSpring. They have just the right amount of features that makes it the most useful for all of our clients, leaving off the bells and whistles that would inflate the price.

Their interface is top-tier which makes using their system a breeze. The dashboard gives you a comprehensive look at everything you're running. Moving around the system is super simple and they make it easy to jump to different areas when you're building a sales program. I'd urge you to check out all the features on their website because there are too many to list, but I can say that what they have offered us is unbelievably comprehensive.

We've also taken full advantage of their support which is outstanding. They have always been knowledgable and very friendly. Moreover, they won't let you off the phone until they are sure that the problem has been resolved! They also offer FREE continuing education programs like webinars to help make you more proficient at their program.

SharpSpring is a superior marketing automation platform, with a very intuitive interface and offer the kind of support we have rarely seen in tech companies. They have worked harder to earn and keep our business than any other vendor we've ever worked with. You would do yourself a giant favor to give their system a test drive.

Cons

I was not prepared for the steep learning curve that is required to take full advantage of this platform. I was a bit discouraged at first by everything there was to learn but I realized it's part of working with such a comprehensive platform. It's like moving to a new town and trying to figure out all the roads and highways. I don't know if that's really a con but it is something you must be aware of. You're going to need to spend some serious time learning it but once you do, navigating the system easily becomes second nature.

Pros

The system is easy to use -from training to the online help docs (i.e., self-training) - to the excellent support team, I feel very confident when using the system and making modifications. I know if I can't figure out how to do something I want to do - I can either jump on live chat or call support and someone will happily help me figure it out.

Cons

Reporting capabilities are still growing. They recently launched a new reporting dashboard with canned "custom" reports but I would like the idea to select the variables myself and run a report on my data - including my custom fields. If the fields exist, I'd like to run reports on them. I have figured out, however, that, I can export a lot into excel and create my own reports when needed.

Alternatives Considered

HubSpot Marketing Hub, Basecamp and Marketo Engage

Reasons for Switching to Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring)

Cost, support and customization

Pros

Easy to use
Great support team - tickets are handled in a timely fashion
Easy to implement
Great Documentation
Great for small, uncomplicated implementations - If your implementation will involve more complex requirements and/or CRM functionalities, stay away from SharpSpring
CRM works Ok

Cons

Automations are not always automatic - work flows sometimes do not work, expect to do manual work.
List segmentations do not always populate automatically - automated lists do not alwys self populate according to their rules
Custom reports are not custom (you cannot filter by custom fields, for example)
Reporting in SharpSpring is very poor
It is easier to export information to Excel to generate useful reports
Social functionalities are very shallow