Lead Gen & CRM Reviews

Pros

Being a Partner for 4+ years has allowed us to grow with them. When they were a startup, we were able to really see the changes the partners were requesting and the software has come a long way. They really value their Partners (agencies).

Cons

Sometimes SharpSpring likes to release new features, while they need to also work on continually improving their existing features.

Alternatives Considered

HubSpot Marketing Hub, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement and Act-On

Reasons for Choosing Lead Gen & CRM

Marketo was very expensive and did not allow us to resell to clients. Also not user friendly.

Switched From

Marketo Engage

Reasons for Switching to Lead Gen & CRM

Much less expensive and really built for agencies like us. The others also really charged a lot for the number of contacts we would have, making them not feasible.

Pros

SharpSpring does everything you would expect at a competitive price. The tool is a very capable marketing automation system, with good email and automation capabilities, as well as some great tracking and social media features.

Cons

Reporting is good, but not as good as the best (which is HubSpot in my opinion). Although the capabilities don't hold us back, it would be nice to be able to have easy ways to measure the performance of landing pages/funnels.

Alternatives Considered

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement and Marketo Engage

Reasons for Choosing Lead Gen & CRM

We switched mainly because of price.

Switched From

HubSpot Marketing Hub

Reasons for Switching to Lead Gen & CRM

SharpSpring offers almost everything that other, more expensive, products offer, but at a very competitive price-point. Our clients who have deployed SharpSpring have been equally happy with the performance and results they have achieved.

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 Overall, really clunky and outdated.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

price.

Pros

If you are searching for a cloud software to manage marketing automation, Sharpspring got you covered at a much lower price than other competitors. You don't need any design skills to be able to make it work. They have a good training program and support is also very effective.

Cons

Although you can get results pretty quickly, usability could be better when building landing pages or emails. Social posting is in my experience still not reliable. Nonetheless, they offer good support and constant improvement.

Pros

I really enjoy the various features that are available within the platform! It allows us to quickly and easily identify our prospects, capture their information on the website, and then market to them in a way that is meaningful and generates new business for us.

Cons

In their mission to make their platform compete, they often focus on getting new features out quickly but then have to go back and update later. I've seen this happen for them with tools like Video Calling, which became quickly available due to COVID-19 but lacks the robustness of other dedicated video platforms that I would imagine most companies already use.

Alternatives Considered

HubSpot Marketing Hub

Reasons for Choosing Lead Gen & CRM

We were using Infusionsoft before they were acquired by Keap. The platform had some nice features, but it was primarily missing the ability for us to resell the platform. We wanted to offer marketing automation to our clients, but didn't want to get caught in the trap like most other agencies do: the automation platforms own the client, not the agency. With SharpSpring, they are an agency-first company that allows us to own our client relationships. That is a huge win in our books!

Switched From

Keap

Reasons for Switching to Lead Gen & CRM

Because SharpSpring allowed us to own our client relationships rather than letting HubSpot own the relationship. This has allowed us tremendous opportunity to scale our business, because we can offer a variety of services AND the platform to the client, when HubSpot doesn't allow that.

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

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

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

Pros

Powerful tools for lead generation to pretty good customer management, tons of options to personalize a lot of aspect of the company. very good tools for building email marketing and landing pages with out third parties

Cons

I think one point where sharpspring lose flexibility is on landing page creations, how designer we need more tools for layout.

Alternatives Considered

HubSpot Marketing Hub, Keap and Marketo Engage

Reasons for Choosing Lead Gen & CRM

We are simply looking for a more robust alternative

Switched From

Mailchimp

Reasons for Switching to Lead Gen & CRM

Easy to use, unlimited user with out pay more for each user, Price

Pros

Everything! It does everything we could ever as a CRM to do. I love how everything is customizable to what fits my company's needs.

Cons

I would make some changes to the reporting tools and creation of emails.

Alternatives Considered

Salesforce Platform

Reasons for Choosing Lead Gen & CRM

Keap sucked and SharpSpring could do everything any business would need in the digital business world.

Switched From

Keap

Reasons for Switching to Lead Gen & CRM

SharpSpring gave us everything we needed and more at a great price

Pros

SharpSpring lets us manage a wide variety of marketing and client management activities in one easy-to-use platform. Everything from marketing automation, to transparent sales pipelines, to persona-focused automated (and adjustable) messaging tools, we can save hundreds of hours on marketing tasks, while regularly engaging our clients' prospects and increasing overall sales.

Cons

SharpSpring could work on improving their help files significantly. While their live support staff are excellent, I feel like for most questions, I have to contact them, rather than simply look up a well-written help article to get many answers.

Alternatives Considered

HubSpot Marketing Hub

Reasons for Switching to Lead Gen & CRM

The agency focus was the major thing. Instead of having our team log out and log into dozens of different client accounts, we can manage the major details from our master account, and then quickly switch into a client account and interact with their particular needs.

Pros

I love the forms feature. Quick design and launch into your website and start tracking leads!

Cons

I found it Difficult to customize Landing Pages.

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

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

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

The biggest plus is its affordability - all the features you need at a price that is accessible. It has all the core functions one needs in a marketing automation platform, with a powerful sales pipeline and lead management component that provides an exceptional, integrated experience. Added bonuses are chatbox and book-time features included in the price, and the ability to sync Outlook emails to a contact's record. Lead scoring

Cons

The email editor can be a bit clunky and formatting copy and layouts can be finicky. The email previewer can be cumbersome. Visual workflows can be arduous to make

Alternatives Considered

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

Reasons for Choosing Lead Gen & CRM

I left one company where I used Marketo (as a Certified Marketo Expert) and advocated for a cheaper solution at the company where I now work. It's been an excellent choice and the platform has not disappointed.

Switched From

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

Reasons for Switching to Lead Gen & CRM

Purely for the cost. It's so much more affordable and it makes it accessible to a lot more companies without a huge financial commitment. The tool's functionality, the onboarding, and the customer support has been second-to-none.

Pros

We moved to SharpSpring from another leading marketing automation software provider and SharpSpring provide 95% of the features for less than half the cost. The software itself is easy to understand and navigate (much easier than our previous system) and the support team are responsive, friendly and helpful. We've been very happy with our migration to SharpSpring and intend to be a user for the foreseeable future. It meets our needs as a specialist life science marketing agency perfectly.

Cons

There are some features that are missing from SharpSpring vs our previous provider, but on balance we felt that either 1. We wouldn't use them 2. We could live without them for the cost savings and other benefits of SharpSpring. Dynamic forms would be great to have, and the analytics sometimes don't match our other analytics software. What I will say is that SharpSpring seem more responsive to requests for new features vs our old provider.

Pros

The pricing model is favorable. We were able to onboard 2-3 clients almost immediately as compared to really struggling trying to sell HubSpot.
The sightline on data and our sales pipeline is good and shows us that we are seeing value (however, our company needs to do more on our end to really leverage the tool).

Cons

We haven't found a use for the content calendar function, compared to other methods we use.
Lead scoring could be improved.

Alternatives Considered

HubSpot Marketing Hub

Reasons for Choosing Lead Gen & CRM

Looking for a more cost-effective solution. We were paying a lot and having difficulties winning new business based on the Hubspot pricing structure.

Switched From

HubSpot Marketing Hub

Reasons for Switching to Lead Gen & CRM

Our primary lens for looking at SharpSpring was based on a comparison to HubSpot. We found the platform to essentially be fully comparable with a more favorable pricing structure. Since making the switch, we haven't seen any reduction in capabilities and are finding it much easier to sell to our clients.

Pros

I love using this software on a daily basis and using it to manage my leads. As a salesperson, it is challenging to find a CRM that actually works for you, not where you have to work for it. I like the ease of use with the kanban boards as well as the marketing automation for drip campaigns.

Cons

The mobile app is inoperable and not relevant. Sometimes the search feature is challenging to use- sometimes you need to use the companies name, sometimes you have to use the contacts name. When working in the drip campaigns you have to be really specific about which dates you select.

Alternatives Considered

Salesforce Sales Cloud and HubSpot CRM

Reasons for Choosing Lead Gen & CRM

The ease of use for marketing automation and ability to synchronize emails for communication transparency.

Switched From

Zoho CRM

Reasons for Switching to Lead Gen & CRM

Pricing, ease of use, and presentation from the SharpSpring staff. Hubspot made us feel like we were taking up their time and not valued. Salesforce was too much for what we needed. SharpSpring made us feel valued and explained their product well by asking us questions first and tailoring their presentation around our needs, not just sending us through a powerpoint.

Pros

The email builder, landing page builder and form builder are all straightforward and fairly easy to learn. There are also help/support articles for pretty much anything I need help with or get stuck on. The "life of the lead" view is helpful to see a contact's interactions with our brand.

Cons

The email and landing page builders offer a lot of flexibility in layout/design, but sometimes they are a bit too restrictive in terms of moving elements around.

Alternatives Considered

Insightly, NetSuite, GreenRope and Marketo Engage

Reasons for Choosing Lead Gen & CRM

The previous platform was a lot more expensive and under-utilized.

Switched From

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

Reasons for Switching to Lead Gen & CRM

The abundance of features for the price. Specifically, number of contacts allowed, emails sent and ability to manage clients in addition to our agency business.

Pros

Our customers are benefitting as much as we are and it starts with the automated services. We can route inquiries to sales reps faster and continue conversations with customers instantaneously through dynamic messaging.

Cons

We need to understand Sales Optimizer better. It may be a software solution that we don't necessarily fit with, but we still think this is something we can improve with, but right now its a slice of the pie that we struggle with.

Alternatives Considered

HubSpot Marketing Hub, Pipedrive, Salesforce Sales Cloud and HubSpot CRM

Reasons for Choosing Lead Gen & CRM

SharpSpring brought more to the table from a customer experience and data management tool.

Switched From

Sage CRM

Reasons for Switching to Lead Gen & CRM

Cost and the fact that we weren't buying ala'carte, rather we felt like we were buying into a partner experience.

Pros

For several years now, SharpSpring has been my secret weapon. I work largely with educational, startup, and nonprofit ventures - so we are always resource constrained. SharpSpring's platform allows me to leverage a small (or solo) shop into something of competitive size, then scale up as we grow. And it doesn't break the bank. When you're working with a skeletal or non-existent team, the ease of use and customer support become critical: SharpSpring always "wows" me on this. Plus, the automation lets me optimize the resources I have while the intelligence tools keep me from wasting time on projects with low ROI. SharpSpring delivers the functionality that gets me noticed by the higher ups. (In one role, we doubled all major KPIs within a year's time.) I couldn't do my job without it!

Cons

Marketing Intelligence software is complex and the learning curve can be challenging, even with great support. Also, not everything in SharpSpring is where I expect it to be - I often use the chat support function to find tools. Oh, and if you are West Coast, start your SharpSpring projects early as chat support wanes after 3pm Pacific due to the company being headquartered in Florida.

Alternatives Considered

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

Reasons for Choosing Lead Gen & CRM

Value for cost, functionality, and assurance that we weren't going to be 'nickle and dimed' as we grew in our needs, scope, etc.

Switched From

Salesforce Essentials

Reasons for Switching to Lead Gen & CRM

Pardot gets expensive fast. I'd love to add familiarity with the product to my resume - but the price puts it out of range for most of the organizations I've worked with thus far.

Pros

It has a lot of features and they keep adding new ones. From only one platform I'm able to keep track of my client's websites, create the forms, and manage the submissions, leads can schedule meetings with specialists without having to wait (or to interact with another human being) and I can keep track of everything with the help of the Life of the Lead. The automations available are a big deal as well, everybody in the team is aware of their responsibilities and the platform helps them never forget to follow-up.

Cons

The email builder could use some improvements, maybe something more intuitive, more templates, more flexibility while making changes. Also, de contact manager is still kinda coarse, should work more like a database and not only as a display, it could be more flexible. And allow to bulk-import contacts with no emails could be huge.

Alternatives Considered

Sprout Social, HubSpot Marketing Hub and Mailchimp

Reasons for Switching to Lead Gen & CRM

Because we saw SharpSpring as the ideal solution for the size of our clients, something more complex could have been way too much, and going for an analysis gadget would have been a potential trouble maker.

Pros

SharpSpring offered us a way to implement marketing automation at a price that our business could afford. The features are more than enough for us to compete with companies that are much larger than we are. So the pricing got us to commit, but since then their customer service has proved to be nothing short of spectacular.
The onboarding was laid out for us step-by-step. We have a specialist that we talk to frequently that keeps us on task. When we did hit a snag, support stepped in to resolve it quickly and accurately.
The video training shows click by click what to do and how to do it. An added value is a webinar series on implementation and use.
The platform is modeled in a way that replicates our business model, so our employees found it logical and easy to implement their pieces of the big picture.

Cons

It's been working well for us, so it's kinda hard to come up with a dislike, but if I had to pick something it would be the fact that the weekly webinars "SharpSpring at Work" just went from weekly to bi-weekly. The upside is that they are planning at making them more in-depth.

Alternatives Considered

HubSpot Marketing Hub

Reasons for Switching to Lead Gen & CRM

It was the price, features and integration abilities that led us to choose SharpSpring.

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

Cost and HubSpot's lack of flexibility.

Switched From

HubSpot Marketing Hub

Reasons for Switching to Lead Gen & CRM

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

Cost vs. benefit. Has all of the features our clients want or need, without a bunch of stuff we have to pay for that they don't need.

Cons

It's a struggle to find something I don't like, but if it was one thing over the past two years, it would be the lack of support on the sales side for our clients. More customized training and presentations for client side would be great.

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

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

Cost, support and customization