Zendesk Sell Review 2023: Best CRM for SMBs?

Zendesk Sell's contact management system allows users to store and organize customer information all in one place.

We were able to easily do the following with Zendesk Sell's contact management:

• Add contacts
• Change our view from table to list
• Filter contacts by a number of metrics
• Create custom fields to filter contacts
• Create and save contacts as "smart lists"

Here's an example of some affiliate marketing and PPC campaign contacts we uploaded.

One thing we liked was how easy it was to import contacts from another CRM or data source.

Here are some sources that Zendesk Sell syncs contacts seamlessly with:

• Excel
• Zoho
• Salesforce
• Google Sheets
• Google Contacts

Once your contacts are imported, you can easily view the following for each contact:

• Tickets in support
• Collaborators
• Upcoming appointments
• Active tasks
• Documents

Being able to easily track everything from emails and tasks to documents and upcoming appointments is invaluable when it comes to nurturing relationships with clients.

Plus, Zendesk Sell makes it super easy for support and sales teams to collaborate for the best customer experience possible.

If you're an SMB that needs help with contact management, Zendesk Sell has you covered (and then some).

Zendesk Sell has a number of task management features to help sales teams stay on top of their leads.

Users can easily create tasks, assign them to other team members, set due dates, and track progress all in one platform.

The task feature was especially helpful when we were running campaigns with multiple team members involved.

We put in some of the onboarding tasks and publishing deadlines that we typically have at Small Business Bonfire. Here's what our task management looked like during our testing.

One aspect of task management that stood out to us was the "play tasks" feature. This allows your teams to work through all of the tasks that are assigned, choosing which ones to skip and which ones to reschedule.

If your SMB has a lot of tasks to complete, this feature can really help your teams zone in and get them done.

The one thing we would have liked to see from this feature is the ability to create subtasks (to see overall progress) for each task.

Zendesk Sell offers some fantastic lead management and prospecting capabilities to take the pressure off your sales teams while simultaneously scaling up your sales efforts.

Management

Zendesk Sell lets you track leads from initial contact all the way through the sales process.

This includes everything from tracking interactions with contacts, adding tags and notes to leads, customizing fields for personalized lead management, and even setting follow-up reminders.

Adding new leads is easy, but don't just take our word for it — here's the "add a new lead" interface to give you a better idea.

Plus, you can easily segment your leads into different stages of the pipeline so that you aren't wasting time trying to reach leads who are already in the final stages of the sales process.

Here's an example of some leads we input into the platform.

At SBB, we utilize CRMs for deal management, so these are specifically affiliate marketing, PPC campaign, and business contacts that are our potential clients.

Prospecting

Zendesk Sell also allows you to search for leads quickly and easily find new prospects using Zendesk Sell's Reach feature.

We loved this feature, as it allowed us to quickly browse (literally) millions of companies and quickly find potential new leads with minimal effort.

This is especially great for small businesses looking to quickly build up their prospects and convert them into leads.

It essentially allows sales teams to save time and effort instead of tracking leads down the old-fashioned way.

Here's an example of some of the companies we were able to get prospects from using Reach.

Sales engagement tools like this are what make Zendesk stand out from the competition as far as we're concerned.

When you combine that with the powerful support features of Zendesk for Service, you've got a pretty powerful customer relationship management tool at your disposal.

When we navigated to the deals pipeline tab for the first time, we were asked to sign up for a PandaDoc account.

This is because the two platforms have partnered together to allow you to easily track, collect, and send eSignatures across multiple channels. We signed up and were pretty impressed throughout our testing.

What's great about this sort of deal automation is that it allows your business process to move much more quickly and efficiently.

You can easily accomplish the following with a few clicks:

• Add contracts
• Change terms
• Update pricing information
• Send documents for signature
• Collect payments

Plus, you can do this all in one intuitive platform without ever having to leave the Zendesk Sell interface.

If you've got a lot of deals and contracts coming in, Zendesk Sell provides a great solution with PandaDoc.

We found that navigating the deals pipeline itself was very straightforward. The platform does a fantastic job of keeping everything simple and letting you edit each deal simply by clicking on the pipeline itself.

Lots of CRMs we've tested require you to click an additional field to edit each section, whereas Zendesk lets you customize each area from multiple locations.

Zendesk Sell provides three views for their pipelines, including:

• Table
• Board
• Stage

We really liked the board view, as it allowed us to easily move around deals with the drag-and-drop interface.

Here's what our deals board looked like with some of our affiliate marketing and PPC deals.

The only issue we had was that sometimes our deals didn't update until we had refreshed the page multiple times.

This could potentially be frustrating while working with a large sales team and editing lots of deals in real time if they aren't updating correctly.

Sales triggers are another secret ingredient that separates Zendesk Sell from a lot of the other CRM options out there.

With sales triggers, users can create if/then scenarios that automate the workflow of sales reps, and this feature might just be the golden ticket your SMB needs to elevate your sales game.

So how do sales triggers work, you may ask? Well, picture this — you have a team of sales reps who spend their day manually updating leads and following up with contacts.

It's time-consuming (and, honestly, pretty tedious). But with Zendesk Sell's sales triggers, you can have your CRM work for you by setting up automated workflows based on specific triggers.

For example, let's say you have a lead who's expressed interest in your product and has given you their email address. You can set up a sales trigger that sends a follow-up email to that lead automatically, saving your sales team both time and effort.

Or, if a customer views a particular product on your website, you can have a sales trigger that sends them a personalized email with more information about that product. The possibilities are endless.

One of our favorite features that Zendesk Sell offers is its reporting and analytics capabilities.

With Zendesk Sell's analytics, you can easily track your sales team's performance, identify trends and patterns, and get a better understanding of your customers and prospects.

Need to know how many deals your team closed last month and what their average deal size was? Want to see how many leads your top rep generated last quarter and what sources they came from?

With Zendesk Sell, you can get all that and more in just a few clicks.

Some areas Zendesk Sell allows you to track include the following:

• Pipeline analysis
• Sales performance
• Activity reports
• Goals
• Sales insights
• Success insights
• Marketing effectiveness

Zendesk Sell also has a dashboard feature that is easy to navigate and customize, even for beginners.

We set our dashboard up using their helpful widgets (shown below).

With just a few clicks (and drag-and-drops), we customized our dashboard to our liking. Here's how our view looked to give you a better idea of how easy it is.

Zendesk Sell also offers a robust mobile app to give your team full access to the CRM on the go.

The mobile app features almost all of the same capabilities as the web version, so you can easily manage leads, view analytics and dashboards, track deals, create workflows, and more — all from your phone or tablet.

We downloaded the app on IOS and were able to navigate it with ease.

Here's our dashboard view from mobile.

One thing we loved about the app is just how easy it is to use it was. In some ways, we felt like it actually had a better interface than the site itself!