Small businesses can manage all that using a combination of spreadsheets, email, and workplace communication, and intranet tools like Slack and Rocket. But beyond a certain level, it gets overwhelming managing the sales process manually.
That’s where enterprise CRMs come in.
Enterprise CRMs help large organizations with large sales operations to manage their sales processes coherently and efficiently. With a few buttons, SDRs can assign deals to teammates, track deals, and discuss with team members, right inside one interface.
Sales leaders can use an enterprise CRM to track productivity across their team, report progress to the c-suite, reassign deals, forecast revenue, and coordinate with customer support to get customer issues resolved quickly.
In this article, we’ll be looking at:
An enterprise CRM offers a comprehensive customer relationship management solution designed around the needs of larger companies with huge sales departments.
The larger a sales department grows, the need to communicate with each other, collaborate on deals, and for the sales leader to be able to track everyone’s performance also grows.
Above: Example of a sales rep’s dashboard in Salesforce CRM
Enterprise CRMs like Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, and Netsuite are designed to offer a more complete customer relationship management experience right inside one interface for larger sales teams where there are lots of data points, team members, deals, and customers to manage.
There are hundreds of CRM software options for your team to choose from, and they’re either designed for small and medium businesses or larger enterprises.
So, which should you choose?
SMB customer relationship management software focuses mainly on simplicity and ease of use.
They’re designed to offer growing sales teams the key features they need to manage the sales process, collaborate, and close deals with as few bells and whistles as possible.
These include basic sales features like:
SMB customer relationship management software providers aim to give SDRs enough functionality to close deals without getting in the way with a bloated platform full of features and widgets that are hard to figure out.
Enterprise CRMs, like the name implies, are designed for enterprises: larger companies with huge sales operations. They offer a wider range of features designed to cover every use case a larger team might encounter, like automating tasks, liaising with customer success, and integrating with third-party applications to enable growing businesses to customize as they see fit.
In addition to the basic features SMB CRMs offer, enterprise CRMs also provide:
SMB CRMs are designed to be easy to use and to prioritize simplicity over functionality. In essence, you get the basic features you need to get your sales operation running.
Enterprise CRMs are designed to serve as more comprehensive solutions that meet every use case a larger sales organization may require.
In addition to the basic sales features SMB CRMs offer, enterprise CRMs provide more extensive tools for managing your pipeline, collaborating with team members, and keeping tabs on productivity and analytics.
If you’re looking to choose the best enterprise CRM possible, you need to factor in how well it manages the unique features you need for your sales organization, especially since enterprise CRM software requires a long-term financial commitment that might lock you into a contract for months or years.
Here’s a snapshot of the five major features you should expect from an enterprise CRM product and how they’re designed to help you.
Sales forecasting helps sales teams predict future sales performance based on potential deals in the pipeline. It factors in variables like lead scoring and pipeline volume to estimate how many of the leads in the pipeline will convert to successful deals and how much revenue it’ll bring in.
On average, salespeople spend 2.5 hours per week on forecasts (which are often manual) that are typically less than 75% accurate.
An enterprise CRM can dig into your pipeline, score leads to determine how likely they are to convert, and use all that data to automatically build more realistic forecasts that’ll help you determine your expected revenue.
An enterprise CRM can take the hard work out of your marketing processes with CRM workflows designed to trigger specific actions to further engage prospects after they take some steps.
Enterprise CRM workflows can be designed to:
Enterprise CRM marketing workflows use if-then logic to automatically trigger engagement actions when prospects or existing customers take certain steps.
Enterprise CRMs also have sales process automation tools that trigger an action when prospects take certain steps or when a condition is met.
Sales automation helps SDRs focus on closing deals and can automatically follow up with leads, pre-qualify opportunities, assign deals to the best-suited SDR, or share pre-recorded demos and sales collateral to further engage prospects until they close.
For example, sales process workflows can be designed to:
Sales process workflows use logic rules to automatically carry out a programmed next step without direct input from your sales team.
An enterprise CRM can dig into several data points and refine them into metrics you can use to keep tabs on your sales team’s performance. These include performance metrics like:
Instead of manually calculating these metrics in a spreadsheet, an enterprise CRM can dig into all your data points and surface them on dashboards that clearly show your sales operation’s health.
Enterprise CRMs simplify lead management by making it easier to collect and store information on individual prospects. This includes:
Your prospects are at the center of your sales efforts. Enterprise CRMs make it easier to engage them through multiple channels, make notes of their pain points, and keep their details up to date, right from one interface.
We’ve done a deep dive into the major enterprise CRM software on the market, grading by how comprehensive a solution they offer, pricing, user-friendliness, and the quality of support you can expect as you use each one to run your sales operations daily.
G2 Review: 4/5
Pricing: $25 – $300 per user per month
If you’re expecting or already experiencing enterprise-level growth in your sales operations, Salesforce was designed for you.
Salesforce provides a comprehensive customer relationship management platform designed to help large teams, manage leads, engage prospects, coordinate with your customer support team, track sales, conduct and track marketing campaigns, and keep tabs on your performance metrics.
From Microsoft Outlook to Gmail, salesforce integrates extensively with the tools you already use across your stack and makes it easy to manage sales actions outside Salesforce and still have everything organized in one source of truth.
Key features
G2 Review: 4/5
Pricing: $115 – $210 per user per month
Dynamics 365 balances functionality and ease of use: it’s comprehensive enough to enterprise sales teams of thousands of SDRs and it’s intuitive enough for SDRs with a basic knowledge of enterprise sales to get started with it.
Dynamics offers a full-stack customer relationship management tool that combines features like sales process automation, account payable and receivables management, sales analytics tracking, content management, and compliance into a unified sales experience for growing teams.
Key features
G2 Review: 4/5
Pricing: $55 – $185 per user per month
SAP might require some handholding to help your team figure it out, but once you’re started, you’ll realize it’ll help you figure out managing campaigns, engaging leads, keeping tabs on your performance metrics, and collaborating with your team throughout the sales process.
SAP helps businesses engage customers beyond the sales cycle with customer success tools for tracking support tickets, questions, and orders and interacting better with customers throughout their sales lifecycle.
Key features
G2 Review: 3.5/5
Pricing: $75 – $90 per user per month
Oracle CRM on Demand offers a cohesive platform for managing inbound and outbound sales in one source of truth, without tacking on other apps. CRMoD is designed to help enterprise sales teams manage their processes end-to-end, from lead-to-order and opportunity-to-quote without dropping the ball.
CRMoD provides room to work in a huge number of variables and data points that can help sales teams capture new leads, keep track of deals, enhance their lead scoring, and manage sales territory without friction.
While Oracle CRM on Demand’s user interface leaves much to be desired, it packs all you need to run an enterprise sales operation under the hood.
Key features
G2 Review: 4.4/5
Pricing: Limited free tier; paid plans: $23 – $120 per user per month
HubSpot’s easy-to-use CRM is designed for teams of all sizes looking to close more deals, integrate deeply with marketing, build better relationships with customers, and retain them with stellar customer success.
First off, Hubspot is easy to use. Yes, there are variables you have to set up yourself – but HubSpot offers a foolproof customer relationship suite sales teams can get started using without having to spend weeks retraining the entire team.
Hubspot offers intelligent contact management, powerful workflows, analytics, and marketing automation designed to keep your prospects engaged through the pipeline and after the sale.
Key features
G2 Review: 4.5/5
Pricing: Limited free tier; $15 – $69 per user per month
On the surface, Freshworks looks like a lite CRM targeted at SMB users. That’s because Freshworks balances functionality with simplicity. Freshworks packs extensive features designed for enterprise sales teams, designed simply enough for individual SDRs to find their way around.
Freshworks is fast, intuitive, and offers a simple onboarding flow — a huge bonus if you’re a large sales team you’re looking to move to Freshworks. And then there’s lead scoring, team management features, extensive reporting for surfacing your data, and super-fast customer support.
Key features
G2 Review: 4.2
Pricing: $12.5 – $99 per user per month
Pipedrive is an incredibly easy-to-use CRM that’s designed to help growing sales teams manage conversations and conversions without tacking on unnecessary, confusing features.
It’s designed to be powerful enough to help you generate leads from your website, assign deals to team members, manage contacts through the funnel, build custom workflows, and integrate with the rest of your stack.
With data import built-in, you can switch CRMs without spending weeks moving data manually or getting your team up to speed.
Key features
G2 Reviews: 4/5
Pricing: Limited free tier; $12 – $45 per user per month
Zoho CRM markets itself as the operating core for enterprise sales teams.
It provides an extensive range of features that goes above and beyond traditional customer relationship management, with no-code solutions, API support, and a third-party marketplace where you can shop around for integrations with the tools you already use.
Zoho CRM is designed to enhance enterprise sales with efficient account management, performance tracking, and multi-channel support. Put that together, and you can use Zoho CRM to coordinate a growing sales operation to convert and retain customers after the sale.
Key features
G2 Review: 3.8/5
Pricing: Starting at €64 per user per month
Sugar Sell (formerly SugarCRM) combines powerful marketing automation tools and customer relationship management into one place where enterprises can design the customer journey with workflows, nurture leads through the funnel, and offer them a delightful customer experience after they’re converted.
Using Sugar Sell’s multi-channel marketing solution, sales professionals can engage prospects with personalized messages across email, and SMS, automate actions with workflows built inside Sugar Sell, and track performance through every step of the sales platform.
Key features
G2 Review: 3.9/5
Pricing: $999 licensing fee; $99 per user per month
Netsuite offers a comprehensive customer relationship management software that gives enterprise sales teams 360-degree visibility into the customer’s journey so they can customize each prospect’s experience.
Netsuite helps sales teams track their performance at scale, using configurable dashboards, reports, and KPIs that measure lead scores and forecast revenues. In essence, Netsuite brings the entire sales cycle into one cohesive platform where enterprise sales teams can manage the customer lifecycle from the prospect stage through ordering, fulfillment, and support.
Key features
G2 Review: 3/5
Pricing: Limited free tier; paid tiers start at $65 per user per month
Infor CRM provides an enterprise sales solution designed to cover sales, customer service, marketing analytics, and reporting at scale. Infor offers growing enterprise sales teams a deep dive into all their sales and marketing data which they can leverage for making decisions that drive revenue.
To achieve that, Infor connects sales productivity modules with in-depth reporting, analytics, and customer tracking to track customer behavior and customize your sales experience to meet your customers’ needs.
Key features
G2 Review: 4.2/5
Pricing: $19 – $99 per user per month
Zendesk Sell (formerly Base CRM) is Zendesk’s take on customer relationship management — no doubt an effort to build Zendesk’s product lineup into a cohesive marketing, sales, and customer support suite for growing teams.
Zendesk Sell offers a custom pipeline for tracking deals, personalized email marketing, and a digital phone system for sales calls.
Wherever you are you can access Sell via iOS and Android mobile apps that let you take your pipeline with you— a big selling point, unlike for offline or distributed teams that may be working remotely since the new normal set it.
Key features
G2 Review: 4.6/5
Pricing: Starts at $9 – $250 per month for 500 contacts
ActiveCampaign charges a flat rate that is considerably cheaper compared to most other enterprise CRMs that charge per SDR — depending on the number of contacts within your pipeline. For that price point, ActiveCampaign offers an array of features that’s hard to match, especially for growing sales teams.
Key features
G2 Review: 4.5/5
Pricing: $16 – $64 per user per month
Leadsquared promises to increase sales velocity and help enterprise sales teams get deals through the pipeline faster, without having deals fall through the cracks, and spending hours every day manually following up with each prospect.
That’s possible thanks to features like customizable workflows, regimented sales, workday planning across entire teams, and easier collaboration that helps SDRs share insights, reassign deals, and focus on closing new deals.
Key features
G2 Review: 3.4/5
Pricing: Base license starts at $3,750
Oracle Siebel is an on-premise customer relationship management for legacy industries like pharmaceuticals, energy, life sciences, and manufacturing that may have a vested interest in hosting their data locally.
Although it comes at a hefty price tag, Oracle Siebel offers a more traditional CRM with extensive features catered to on-premise users. These include:
Choosing an enterprise CRM that suits your sales needs will be a high-stakes effort — especially since CRMs bring in $8.71 for every dollar spent on it. The right enterprise CRM will help you automate your marketing and sales processes and reduce the number of manual touches needed to get deals through the pipeline.
Whatfix can help you create guided walkthroughs that’ll get your sales reps set up to use your enterprise CRM to close collaborate, close deals, and drive revenue without spending months on trial and error.
Learn how Whatfix can help you roll out your enterprise CRM software to your SDRs and get them onboarded to keep bringing new business without any lag.
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