The modern sales process can be enhanced through a number of different tool sets, including not only customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, but also marketing automation and lead management tool suites as well, not to mention a constantly shifting landscape of data analytics engines and other database-backed solutions.
The trick is integrating all these tools not just with each other but also connecting them efficiently with existing and potential customer data for use by either sales or marketing.
Finding a tool that manages this process for you is difficult, but there are contenders, and Salesfusion is certainly one of them.
Salesfusion doesn't focus on exactly the same things as our more standard CRM Editors' Choice winners, including Zoho CRM (Visit Site at Zoho CRM) and Salesforce Sales Cloud Lightning do.
But it does represent the way these packages are heading and represents a solid choice for small to midsize businesses (SMBs) that want to quickly reach the cutting edge.
Marketing automation services can get a lot of that done for you.
Services such as Salesfusion enable you to create web forms and marketing emails, collect the responses, and pull them into a list of leads.
They automate responses, workflows, and other aspects of the marketing process.
This makes it easier to filter out unlikely leads, route leads to users for follow-up, and push them through the process of transforming them into qualified sales.
These services often work together with traditional CRM services such as any of the aforementioned Editors' Choice winners or other popular platforms such as SugarCRM (40.00 Per Month at SugarCRM) .
In case Salesfusion doesn't directly support your CRM, it also supports an open REST application programming interface (API) so your developers can build the integration themselves.
They differ from lead-generation services (which also collect names of possible leads) in that the latter usually (although not always) use the names they collect to market to companies looking for leads.
Meanwhile, marketing automation services are targeted toward the companies themselves and help them turn customer interactions into automatic marketing campaign actions.
Editions and Pricing
Salesfusion offers two basic pricing packages: Platform and Platform Plus.
The Platform edition, which begins at $700 per month, is anything but basic.
It includes the ability to incorporate at least 5,000 contacts, unlimited users, unlimited email sends, live phone support, and CRM integration.
The Platform Plus edition starts at $1,575 per month, and adds "Professional Services & Campaign Execution," a package of billable hours in which Salesfusion staff with a marketing background would run the platform for you.
You can also optionally pay for these services separately if you subscribe to the Platform edition.
Both editions come with an email builder (Salesfusion uses its own email tool to send email on behalf of your domain but also includes a Microsoft Outlook plug-in), A/B testing, a landing page, form building, campaign management, nurture- and account-based marketing, lead management, webinar/event management, list segmentation, social media management, and a number of reports and analytics.
Salesfusion integrates with a variety of CRMs and includes built-in search engine optimzation (SEO) tools.
It uses a third-party service, Octopost, to work with Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Admittedly, $700 per month may sound expensive when you compare it to CRMs.
However, when you add in marketing automation costs, it becomes quite competitive.
A similar marketing automation service such as HubSpot (50.00 Per Month at HubSpot) , for example, starts at $200 but can rise up to $800 if you opt for its Professional edition.
Where Salesfusion might not be such a great fit for smaller companies is that it also requires one-to-one onboarding and training services.
There are three available: Email Marketer (which costs $1,500) focuses on email campaigns and provides six hours of training over three weeks, Advanced Marketer (which costs $2,500) trains users on email marketing, lead scoring, and nurture programs and provides 12 hours of training over six weeks, and Professional Marketer (which costs $4,000) adds event planning and execution and providers 16 hours of training over eight weeks.
Whether you need to invest in one of these services depends on the needs of your company and your staff's ability to process and integrate the product.
Unfortunately, unlike most of the other products in the CRM or even the marketing automation space, Salesfusion doesn't include any kind of trial or test version, which we found disappointing.
This will make it difficult to evaluate the software for your organization.
Plus, the only way you can get a demo is to have one with a company representative.
There is no immediately available way to kick the tires on your own by using the web.
There are a variety of resources available, including videos, webinars, and an ebook, but they all deal with general marketing topics rather than specific aids to using the software.
Salesfusion has several customer relationship management (CRM)-like features, enough so that the software can be used in that fashion.
However, most companies will probably be better off combining it with a dedicated CRM, such as Salesforce Sales Cloud Lightning Professional or Zoho CRM.
For example, while you can add a task list to a contact and assign tasks to other users, notifications for tasks are limited to emails or to the task tab itself, while more on-point CRMs, such as our Editors' Choice winner Pipedrive (Visit Site at PipeDrive) , generally make it much easier to track impending tasks and activities.
Salesfusion has a very clean user interface (UI) that makes it reasonably easy to find its features.
You open with a Dashboard that lets you view graphs and other informational visuals.
From there, you can access all of your features from a menu that pulls out from the left-hand side of the screen.
The top of the menu offers three choices: Create, Manage, and Analyze.
The Create section lets you create a contact list, begin an email campaign, create a web form or landing page, start planning an event, or set up templates, reports, or scoring.
The Manage section gives you access to your lists of leads and contacts and lets you manage the campaigns, events, etc., that you created.
The Analyze section, as its name implies, offers access to data analysis tools.
Lead Management
Since Salesfusion largely deals with collecting and organizing leads, its lead management is, on the whole, excellent.
New names go into a single main list.
However, by using tabs at the top of the page, you can break the list out into into leads, contacts, or candidates.
When you manually enter a new name, whether it is a lead, a contact, or candidate, you simply enter the first and last names, email address, and to whom the account is assigned.
Once the record is saved, you can then add a variety of other information.
Besides the preprogrammed fields, you can create your own custom fields as well.
There are also separate account pages where, beneath the name and basic information, are tabbed pages.
One these pages, you can either see various details about the account (such as the status, CRM type, etc.), the lists on which the person is included, any nurtures, a scoring summary, account contacts, tasks, and opportunities.
Since this isn't a CRM per se, you don't have a place in which to easily make notes, say, on phone calls; for that, you'd want to attach this to a CRM.
On the right-hand side is "the Journey section," where you can see all of the various actions, events, etc., in which the account has been involved.
While it might be second-rate when viewed as a CRM, the number of lead-generation and management features in Salesfusion are truly impressive.
You can collect data from emails, web forms.
and other sources.
You can set up a campaign, a landing page, or an event (its management of events is especially extensive).
You can set up scoring for your leads and put your results through a search engine optimization (SEO) audit.
The process of creating and managing these various processes does not seem difficult.
For example, when you create a web form, you can choose from several themes and templates, not to mention there are a wide range of field types you can drag and drop into a form, including check boxes, ReCaptcha fields, dropdowns, and others.
Reporting and Third-Party Integration
Salesfusion's Dashboard shows all of your various reports, of which there are many.
These include marketing and sales performance, the click rate and open rate for email campaigns, web page views, and others.
You can easily move them into any order on the page and you can maximize any to see more details.
It integrates with a variety of third-party services, including the aforementioned Octopost.
Salesfusion is a marketing automation service that offers a wide variety of tools for lead generation and, unlike many of its peers, also provides efficient tools for managing leads and ushering them into a more active role.
While it cannot be said to be a full CRM, it does work hand in hand with Salesforce and other CRMs.
It's not inexpensive to say the least, but it could be a very valuable service for an enterprise that wants to energetically generate leads.
Pros
Comprehensive and flexible feature set for automating the collection of leads, creating campaigns, and employing other marketing strategies.
Manageable email tools.
Comprehensive info on leads and contacts.
The Bottom Line
Salesfusion is a sophisticated marketing automation platform that also extends to CRM and lead management needs.
It might wind up being more expensive for you than other solutions, but its feature set will likely alleviate most pricing concerns.
The modern sales process can be enhanced through a number of different tool sets, including not only customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, but also marketing automation and lead management tool suites as well, not to mention a constantly shifting landscape of data analytics engines and other database-backed solutions.
The trick is integrating all these tools not just with each other but also connecting them efficiently with existing and potential customer data for use by either sales or marketing.
Finding a tool that manages this process for you is difficult, but there are contenders, and Salesfusion is certainly one of them.
Salesfusion doesn't focus on exactly the same things as our more standard CRM Editors' Choice winners, including Zoho CRM (Visit Site at Zoho CRM) and Salesforce Sales Cloud Lightning do.
But it does represent the way these packages are heading and represents a solid choice for small to midsize businesses (SMBs) that want to quickly reach the cutting edge.
Marketing automation services can get a lot of that done for you.
Services such as Salesfusion enable you to create web forms and marketing emails, collect the responses, and pull them into a list of leads.
They automate responses, workflows, and other aspects of the marketing process.
This makes it easier to filter out unlikely leads, route leads to users for follow-up, and push them through the process of transforming them into qualified sales.
These services often work together with traditional CRM services such as any of the aforementioned Editors' Choice winners or other popular platforms such as SugarCRM (40.00 Per Month at SugarCRM) .
In case Salesfusion doesn't directly support your CRM, it also supports an open REST application programming interface (API) so your developers can build the integration themselves.
They differ from lead-generation services (which also collect names of possible leads) in that the latter usually (although not always) use the names they collect to market to companies looking for leads.
Meanwhile, marketing automation services are targeted toward the companies themselves and help them turn customer interactions into automatic marketing campaign actions.
Editions and Pricing
Salesfusion offers two basic pricing packages: Platform and Platform Plus.
The Platform edition, which begins at $700 per month, is anything but basic.
It includes the ability to incorporate at least 5,000 contacts, unlimited users, unlimited email sends, live phone support, and CRM integration.
The Platform Plus edition starts at $1,575 per month, and adds "Professional Services & Campaign Execution," a package of billable hours in which Salesfusion staff with a marketing background would run the platform for you.
You can also optionally pay for these services separately if you subscribe to the Platform edition.
Both editions come with an email builder (Salesfusion uses its own email tool to send email on behalf of your domain but also includes a Microsoft Outlook plug-in), A/B testing, a landing page, form building, campaign management, nurture- and account-based marketing, lead management, webinar/event management, list segmentation, social media management, and a number of reports and analytics.
Salesfusion integrates with a variety of CRMs and includes built-in search engine optimzation (SEO) tools.
It uses a third-party service, Octopost, to work with Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Admittedly, $700 per month may sound expensive when you compare it to CRMs.
However, when you add in marketing automation costs, it becomes quite competitive.
A similar marketing automation service such as HubSpot (50.00 Per Month at HubSpot) , for example, starts at $200 but can rise up to $800 if you opt for its Professional edition.
Where Salesfusion might not be such a great fit for smaller companies is that it also requires one-to-one onboarding and training services.
There are three available: Email Marketer (which costs $1,500) focuses on email campaigns and provides six hours of training over three weeks, Advanced Marketer (which costs $2,500) trains users on email marketing, lead scoring, and nurture programs and provides 12 hours of training over six weeks, and Professional Marketer (which costs $4,000) adds event planning and execution and providers 16 hours of training over eight weeks.
Whether you need to invest in one of these services depends on the needs of your company and your staff's ability to process and integrate the product.
Unfortunately, unlike most of the other products in the CRM or even the marketing automation space, Salesfusion doesn't include any kind of trial or test version, which we found disappointing.
This will make it difficult to evaluate the software for your organization.
Plus, the only way you can get a demo is to have one with a company representative.
There is no immediately available way to kick the tires on your own by using the web.
There are a variety of resources available, including videos, webinars, and an ebook, but they all deal with general marketing topics rather than specific aids to using the software.
Salesfusion has several customer relationship management (CRM)-like features, enough so that the software can be used in that fashion.
However, most companies will probably be better off combining it with a dedicated CRM, such as Salesforce Sales Cloud Lightning Professional or Zoho CRM.
For example, while you can add a task list to a contact and assign tasks to other users, notifications for tasks are limited to emails or to the task tab itself, while more on-point CRMs, such as our Editors' Choice winner Pipedrive (Visit Site at PipeDrive) , generally make it much easier to track impending tasks and activities.
Salesfusion has a very clean user interface (UI) that makes it reasonably easy to find its features.
You open with a Dashboard that lets you view graphs and other informational visuals.
From there, you can access all of your features from a menu that pulls out from the left-hand side of the screen.
The top of the menu offers three choices: Create, Manage, and Analyze.
The Create section lets you create a contact list, begin an email campaign, create a web form or landing page, start planning an event, or set up templates, reports, or scoring.
The Manage section gives you access to your lists of leads and contacts and lets you manage the campaigns, events, etc., that you created.
The Analyze section, as its name implies, offers access to data analysis tools.
Lead Management
Since Salesfusion largely deals with collecting and organizing leads, its lead management is, on the whole, excellent.
New names go into a single main list.
However, by using tabs at the top of the page, you can break the list out into into leads, contacts, or candidates.
When you manually enter a new name, whether it is a lead, a contact, or candidate, you simply enter the first and last names, email address, and to whom the account is assigned.
Once the record is saved, you can then add a variety of other information.
Besides the preprogrammed fields, you can create your own custom fields as well.
There are also separate account pages where, beneath the name and basic information, are tabbed pages.
One these pages, you can either see various details about the account (such as the status, CRM type, etc.), the lists on which the person is included, any nurtures, a scoring summary, account contacts, tasks, and opportunities.
Since this isn't a CRM per se, you don't have a place in which to easily make notes, say, on phone calls; for that, you'd want to attach this to a CRM.
On the right-hand side is "the Journey section," where you can see all of the various actions, events, etc., in which the account has been involved.
While it might be second-rate when viewed as a CRM, the number of lead-generation and management features in Salesfusion are truly impressive.
You can collect data from emails, web forms.
and other sources.
You can set up a campaign, a landing page, or an event (its management of events is especially extensive).
You can set up scoring for your leads and put your results through a search engine optimization (SEO) audit.
The process of creating and managing these various processes does not seem difficult.
For example, when you create a web form, you can choose from several themes and templates, not to mention there are a wide range of field types you can drag and drop into a form, including check boxes, ReCaptcha fields, dropdowns, and others.
Reporting and Third-Party Integration
Salesfusion's Dashboard shows all of your various reports, of which there are many.
These include marketing and sales performance, the click rate and open rate for email campaigns, web page views, and others.
You can easily move them into any order on the page and you can maximize any to see more details.
It integrates with a variety of third-party services, including the aforementioned Octopost.
Salesfusion is a marketing automation service that offers a wide variety of tools for lead generation and, unlike many of its peers, also provides efficient tools for managing leads and ushering them into a more active role.
While it cannot be said to be a full CRM, it does work hand in hand with Salesforce and other CRMs.
It's not inexpensive to say the least, but it could be a very valuable service for an enterprise that wants to energetically generate leads.
Pros
Comprehensive and flexible feature set for automating the collection of leads, creating campaigns, and employing other marketing strategies.
Manageable email tools.
Comprehensive info on leads and contacts.
The Bottom Line
Salesfusion is a sophisticated marketing automation platform that also extends to CRM and lead management needs.
It might wind up being more expensive for you than other solutions, but its feature set will likely alleviate most pricing concerns.
