Short answer: No. It lacks too many essential features.
Given that we use Outlook in house to manage e-mail, personal contacts and a personal calendar, our opinion isn’t out to snub Outlook just to pitch CRM.
In fact, you don’t need to abandon Outlook to get a CRM. Most CRMs will integrate with Outlook to integrate e-mail, contacts or a calendar so critical information can be seen on the smartphone. Furthermore, you can see the email correspondence on the contact record from the CRM.
Difficulties of Using Outlook as a CRM:
- Documenting conversations by date/time stamp and easily sharing them among your team.
- Implementing contact security among your peers.
- Creating a sales forecast.
- Creating a mail-merge to a Word document.
- Creating effective user fields to classify contacts by more than one field such as "category".
- Re-Entering the same data among different applications like Word or Excel becomes a chore to create call reports or sales forecasts.
- Using Outlook is ineffective as a help desk ticketing system.
Zoho Bigin allows an easy way to get into CRM.And you can still use Outlook.
In a matter of minutes, you can have a starter CRM system that tracks contacts, companies and a pipeline along with a mobile app.
- E-Mail: Zoho Mail, Outlook, Office 365, IMAP
- Zoho Apps: Zoho Flow, Books, Invoice, Campaigns, Analytics, Desk and Meeting.
- Popular Apps: MailChimp & Zoom Meeting.
- Advanced Tools: Zapier & API
- Pricing starts at $9/user/month.
- Annual discounts available.
- Training videos included. Chat support provided by Zoho at no additional charge.
What if Bigin isn't enough? Don't worry. We offer plenty of options.
What’s the best CRM platform for you? It depends on what business processes you want to improve. For instance, if you want one point to see all meeting notes, emails and ability to create a report based on those activity KPIs then WiredContact is a great solution. If you want to have one platform to manage CRM, e-marketing, help desk, projects and accounting then Zoho One is a great candidate.
Conversely, if your focus is marketing automation on a tighter budget, Benchmark One has many capabilities similar to Hubspot at a lower price.
Once we know the features you need; then, we craft with a custom solution based on your budget. If you aren’t sure how to approach this, feel free to contact us for a complimentary discovery call.