What is enterprise CRM software? [Guide and Best Picks]
Enterprise CRM comes packed with advanced AI capabilities, extensive customization options, and automation features, making it ideal for large businesses.
Managing customers in large organizations is demanding, procedural, and complex. You manage vast amounts of customer data, coordinate intricate business processes, have security standards, and comply with regulations. Hence, an enterprise CRM must be multi-faceted, comprehensive, and easy to use. It must have features that help you manage all your customers, integrate well with existing processes and tools, and be secure and compliant.
In this guide, we'll equip you with the knowledge and tools to understand enterprise CRM and select the optimal enterprise edition of a CRM for your organization.
What is enterprise CRM?
Enterprise CRM is a software solution that provides a strategic approach to managing customer interactions within a large company.
It is an intuitive system that integrates technologies, processes, and strategies to optimize the entire customer lifecycle. A comprehensive CRM is crucial for large enterprises due to the large-scale sales operations and customer interactions.
It helps sales, marketing, and customer service teams manage customers centralizing and organizing data, ensuring seamless interactions and personalized experiences. The solution enables cross-team collaboration by providing unified access to customer information so enterprises can orchestrate customer experience strategies better.
What are the key features of an enterprise CRM?
When evaluating enterprise CRM solutions, it’s critical to consider the available features to find ones that align with your company’s needs.
1. Holistic customer view
Enterprise CRM should consolidate customer data from various internal and public channels, summarize sales interactions by teams across different regions and business units, and present a comprehensive picture of the prospect.
2. Automation tools
Automation tools significantly enhance efficiency. They streamline repetitive tasks so teams can focus on high-value activities, ensuring consistency in interactions, timely responses, and effective handling of high volumes of data without sacrificing quality.
3. Multi-currency support
Multi-currency support in enterprise CRMs streamlines global transactions, reports revenue accurately, and caters to diverse customer bases. It ensures financial clarity, simplifies cross-border sales, and enhances customer satisfaction by displaying prices and processing transactions in customers' preferred currencies.
4. Customer service capabilities
A robust enterprise CRM with customer service capabilities allows teams to provide timely support across channels. Features like AI chatbots, self-service portals, and knowledge bases streamline support processes, enabling companies to expand operations while maintaining quality.
5. Detailed analytics and reports
Companies can use enterprise CRMs to harness analytics, enabling them to identify growth opportunities. Effective reporting tools allow for analyzing key performance metrics, empowering stakeholders to make informed decisions. Advanced analytics like predictive modeling and machine learning enable enterprises to anticipate customer behaviors and trends.
6. Sales assistance
Sales assistance features, such as lead management, opportunity tracking, and pipeline management automation, provide sales agents with resources to increase productivity. Investing in an enterprise CRM solution with robust sales assistance features equips businesses to achieve their sales goals.
7. Advanced AI
AI-powered features enhance automation and optimize routine tasks such as data entry, lead scoring, email marketing, and communication. Enterprise CRMs with AI can provide AI-driven analytics and insights that help businesses anticipate customer needs and identify opportunities for upselling.
8. CPQ tools
CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) tools enable sales professionals to generate quotes, configure complex products, and determine pricing based on customer needs accurately and efficiently. Centralizing these functions in an enterprise CRM ensures consistency, reduces errors, and accelerates sales cycles.
9. Built-in multichannel capabilities
Avail phone system within your CRM for seamless communication with customers. This feature helps your prospects and customers build a more personal connection just at the click of a button instead of managing and paying for third-party phone bridges.
Automate and personalize email campaigns directly from your CRM environment to allow for targeted communications, nurturing leads, and effective customer engagement.
Tap into AI-driven chatbots to engage with prospects on your pre-sales channels. Chatbots can handle inquiries, guide users through your site, and collect valuable data to enhance engagement and act as a lead generation channel.
10. AI-generated emails
Utilize AI to craft personalized email content that resonates with each recipient based on their interactions and behaviors. This feature optimizes engagement by delivering relevant, compelling messages that drive responses.
What are the benefits of an enterprise CRM system?
In the ever-evolving business world, enterprises are constantly seeking ways to stay ahead of the curve and drive sustainable growth through the following benefits:
1. Smarter customer management
Enterprise CRM platforms efficiently manage large customer bases. They consolidate data from various touchpoints, providing a comprehensive view of customer interactions. These systems use advanced analytics and AI models to process extensive data volumes, enabling businesses to segment customers, personalize interactions, and forecast trends accurately.
2. Improved cross-functional collaboration
Enterprise CRM software enhances cross-functional collaboration across regional teams by breaking silos and providing a unified view of customer data. Using shared dashboards and communication tools, sales, marketing, and support teams can collaborate effortlessly to drive revenue. Real-time updates help different teams establish context for customer interactions, ensuring consistency and strategic alignment.
3. Heightened compliance
Enterprise CRM enhances compliance with regional and international data privacy laws by implementing robust security measures and configurable permission settings. These features ensure sensitive customer data is encrypted, audited, and accessible only to authorized personnel. Data anonymization and consent management capabilities facilitate adherence to regulations like GDPR and CCPA, mitigating risks of non-compliance.
4. Multiple sales pipelines
Enterprise CRM platforms help build multiple sales pipelines tailored to different products, business units, or customer segments. Each pipeline can have its stages, sales teams, and metrics to provide clear, relevant progress and performance overviews. This allows the teams to prioritize opportunities, reduce deal closure time, increase win rates, and drive higher revenue growth.
5. Seamless integration
Enterprise CRM platforms integrate seamlessly with third-party apps, APIs, and existing tech stacks. By connecting your existing technological tools to an enterprise CRM, businesses can streamline operations, gain customer insights, and fuel strategic growth initiatives without investing in entirely new technology.
6. Personalized customer engagement
Enterprise CRM facilitates highly personalized customer engagement at scale using multichannel communication, comprehensive data aggregation, and analysis to tailor interactions based on conversation history, product preferences, and buyer persona. The CRM provides a holistic view of each customer by enriching data from email, chat, SMS, social media, and customer support interactions, enabling sales and customer service teams to build meaningful conversations, nurture relationships, and win customers for life.
7. Increased productivity
Enterprise CRM boosts the productivity and efficiency of sales teams by using process automation. By automating repetitive tasks across the sales cycle, like lead assignment, follow-ups, outreach, and updating records, the CRM allows sales agents to focus on converting more deals and achieving sales targets. Enterprise CRMs also allow businesses to build automation on custom modules.
What is the best enterprise CRM software?
1. Freshsales
Freshsales is an AI-powered enterprise CRM built with a focus on ease of use, powerful features, and exceptional customer support.
Let's explore the key features Freshsales offers and how they can help your sales team achieve peak performance.
2. Freddy AI, your always-on copilot
FreddyAI, Freshsales’ native AI-powered assistant, helps you close deals faster with the right insights.
It also helps you identify high-potential leads, spot bottlenecks, and prioritize deals. It proactively recommends the next best action to steer deals to closure.
With Freddy AI, you can improve conversion rates with the power of personalization through simple prompts. Leverage our AI-powered sales email generator to craft compelling subject lines and draft personalized emails highlighting your unique value proposition.
3. Customer 360 view
Unify customer data across channels and get a 360° view with insights into conversations, activities, and engagement. Freshsales CRM captures every piece of customer information and adds context to your communications.
Get the full context of a customer’s history with a chronological timeline of every activity.
Plan your sales process with clear customer views like tables, lists, or Kanban boards.
4. Pipeline management
Manage your deals and track them throughout the process with pipeline management 2.0 in Freshsales enterprise CRM. Get an overview of deals, check sales performance, set goals, and focus on the actions you need to take to get closer to wins.
Get greater visibility into deals as they move from stage to stage with a visual sales pipeline.
Manage multiple sales pipelines for various customer segments and business units and get a simplified view via Kanban boards.
Maintain a healthy sales pipeline with Freddy AI’s recommendations that nudge you to take the next action and stay on top of opportunities.
Leverage AI-powered insights to better understand your likely-to-close deals compared to at-risk and gone-cold deals.
Forecast future sales to manage and distribute opportunities better and optimize your sales process.
5. Automation to boost productivity
By automating repetitive tasks, sales teams can save time and focus their energy on building customer relationships and closing deals. Two of the most useful automation tools in Freshsales are sales sequences and workflows.
Sales sequences: These automate targeted outreach campaigns that follow a pre-defined schedule. With sales sequences, you can personalize emails, SMS, and reminders and then send them at specific intervals. Use them to nurture leads, follow up consistently, and drive conversions.
Workflows: Triggered in real-time based on specific actions or data updates. For example, a welcome email sent after a form submission or an automated task assigned after a field update. Workflows excel at streamlining lead qualification, internal notifications, and automate customer engagement.
6. Audit logs
Audit logs enable enterprises to track user activities, ensure data integrity, and meet compliance requirements. With Freshsales, you can track changes made to your account for workflows, sales sequences, territories, plans, and CRM settings.
7. Sandbox for testing
Sandbox environments within an enterprise CRM provide developers and administrators a safe space to prototype changes, assess customizations, and troubleshoot issues before deploying them. With Freshsales, you can test new features and configurations in a controlled environment without impacting your customers.
8. Territory management
With Freshsales, you can define territories, assign leads to territories, and set up rules for automatic lead assignment. Other features include territory-based phone number assignment and call forwarding. Freshsales reporting allows you to see sales metrics by territory, which can help you track progress and identify areas for improvement.
Freshsales CRM helps enterprises safeguard sensitive information. With Freshsales, enterprises can:
Configure granular-level settings for every user role
Host and maintain data in compliance with privacy laws
Encrypt and audit customer data
Implement data anonymization and consent management
9. Deal teams
Assemble the best sales talent from different sales units to work on big-ticket deals using the deal teams feature in Freshsales CRM. Bringing together high-performing sales agents can help you drive higher revenue faster as an enterprise.
Freshsales stands out in the enterprise CRM space by providing a solution that is both powerful and easy to use, with customization options to fit any business's unique needs. This approach improves the user experience and aligns closely with organizational goals.
10. Simplicity Meets Functionality
User-Friendly Design: Freshsales is recognized for integrating enterprise CRM features into an intuitive and easy-to-navigate layout.
Efficient Navigation: Thanks to its straightforward interface, users enjoy swift movement through key modules, including lead and contact management, deal tracking, and email integration.
Pricing details:
| Enterprise plan: $59/user/month |
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Key takeaway:
Freshsales is the best enterprise CRM to manage the entire sales process. In addition, it also helps ensure data security with features including role-based access, record management, audit logs, and territory management.
Choose the AI-powered CRM:
The smart way to know and grow your customer base
2. Zoho CRM
Zoho CRM is a cloud-based customer relationship management platform. It is easy to use and provides a user-friendly interface for sales teams to manage leads, track sales activities, and close deals efficiently.
Zoho also offers an AI tool called Zia to help you grow your sales funnel. It can take dictation, capture data automatically, find required data, and spot anomalies based on sales trends.
Key features:
Mobile access: The app provides quick access to your contacts, leads, notes, and deals and is available for iOS and Android.
Workflow rules: Allows you to create many rules, from 10 rules in the free version to up to 125 rules in the enterprise plan.
Charts: Converts customer insights into pie charts, heat maps, and bar graphs to visualize your data better.
AI-powered tools: Predict sales trends and identify areas that need improvement.
Pricing details:
| Enterprise plan: $79/user/month |
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Key takeaway:
Zoho CRM is known for its workflow automation, which streamlines complex sales processes. However, it has limited custom fields, which can be challenging for large businesses.
3. Hubspot Sales Hub
HubSpot Sales Hub is part of HubSpot CRM, an all-in-one platform. The sales hub is designed to bring enterprise CRM tools, data, and teams together so that businesses can scale rapidly.
From tracking new leads using contact management to making the most of all sales opportunities with sentiment analysis, HubSpot Sales Hub is focused on maximizing efficiency with its extensive feature set.
Key features:
Email tracking: Inserts an invisible one-pixel image into the email to track them.
Call tracking and recording: Logs and tracks all calls in your CRM contact records automatically.
Lead management: Helps generate leads and manage all the sales activities using a personalized workspace.
Configure-price-quote: Helps create a streamlined selling process with easy deal tracking and quote creation.
Pricing details:
| Enterprise plan: $150/user/month |
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Key takeaway:
HubSpot Sales Hub is a comprehensive CRM solution with extensive features, making it the right choice for complex enterprise teams.
4. Zendesk Sell
Zendesk Sell is a cloud-based CRM solution designed to help businesses grow their customer base quickly and efficiently. Forbes Advisor and PCMag recognize it for its unified platform, numerous calling features, and smart lists that can help improve the quality of customer conversations.
Zendesk Sell provides flexibility, helping businesses access large customer data and provide modern customer experiences.
Key features:
Calling: Provides a built-in dialer along with call recording capabilities.
Customer analytics: An easy-to-use and drag-and-drop interface for analytics view.
Integrations: Connects with thousands of apps and third-party integrations including Mailchimp, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft 365.
Customization: This enables you to customize the workspace for your sales agents with personalized fields to view concise deal-related information.
Pricing details:
| Enterprise plan: $115/agent/month | 14-day FREE trial |
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Key takeaway:
Zendesk Sell is known for its flexibility and ability to make the best use of data, which can be very helpful for enterprises with extensive data.
5. Salesforce Sales Cloud
Salesforce Sales Cloud is a complete platform for the sales community, including sellers, leaders, operation heads, managers, and agents, to manage their entire sales process efficiently, from lead generation to closing deals. As one of the oldest players, it provides maximum customizable options, making it the perfect fit for large businesses.
In addition to sales functions like lead management, sales pipeline management, and analytics, it also helps measure the team's performance, helping enterprises improve their sales function more efficiently and, ultimately, achieve business goals.
Key features:
Sales automation: Automates sales processes and workflows with drag-and-drop features.
Team productivity: Helps manage team performance along with built-in incentive compensation management.
Revenue lifecycle management: Automates and optimizes revenue by streamlining how you manage products and pricing.
Data cloud: Breaks the silos by unifying all your data without requiring complex and extensive data pipelines.
Pricing details:
| Enterprise plan: $165/user/month |
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Key takeaway:
Salesforce is an all-in-one CRM; however, the initial setup can be challenging and has a steeper learning curve.
Do I need enterprise CRM?
Whether or not you need enterprise CRM can be determined based on the following criteria:
1. You have incomplete customer data
Incomplete data hinders an enterprise’s ability to engage with its customer base. Without a comprehensive view, businesses struggle to deliver personalized experiences and anticipate evolving needs. Enterprise CRM systems provide a centralized repository for storing customer data and auto-enrichments of contacts, ensuring your sales professionals have the best information before they reach out to prospects.
2. Your sales processes are inefficient
Inefficient sales processes impede businesses from capitalizing on opportunities. Enterprise CRMs transform sales management using automated workflows. They streamline repetitive sales tasks, eliminating bottlenecks and accelerating sales cycles. These customizable workflows help teams prioritize activities and engage prospects effectively, ultimately driving revenue growth.
3. Your customer interactions aren’t personalized
Generic interactions won’t help your business stand out against competitors. Enterprise CRM systems offer integrated tools like built-in telephony, email, chatbots, and AI-generated emails that tailor communication at scale, enhancing engagement and fostering meaningful relationships. This personalized approach improves customer satisfaction, drives sales, and cultivates loyalty.
4. Your customer base is growing wider
Rapid growth poses challenges for businesses, especially with managing expanding customer bases, avoiding disruptions, and maintaining consistency. Implementing enterprise CRM allows businesses to efficiently manage increasing volumes of interactions, track sales opportunities, and gain actionable insights.
How to choose the right enterprise CRM software?
Features are a vital starting point, but selecting the optimal enterprise CRM involves looking beyond the checklist. Here's what else to consider:
1. Extensive customization
Customizable enterprise CRM systems allow organizations to tailor the software to their unique and evolving business needs. Enterprises can easily adapt modules, fields, and dashboards to get the best out of the CRM. Customized reporting ensures the sales data is available in the best-suited format to enable faster and more impactful decision-making across the sales units.
2. Smooth migration
Enterprise CRM simplifies migration from legacy CRM systems through comprehensive data import tools and expert support. With customizable migration plans, businesses can easily transition their data while minimizing disruptions, while advanced mapping capabilities ensure data integrity and consistency. Enterprise CRM providers offer training resources and ongoing assistance to ensure a smooth transition.
3. Scalability
Assess not only if the CRM can handle your current size but if it can accommodate larger client bases, more complex sales cycles, and potential expansion into new territories. Look for pricing models that can scale alongside you.
4. Ease of integration
Consider how your enterprise CRM will connect with your accounting software, ERP systems, marketing automation tools, and any legacy platforms you rely on. Seamless integration promotes data accuracy and fosters adoption because your sales team can still use the tools they rely on.
5. Vendor reputation and support
The CRM vendor is your long-term consultant and partner in success. Research their reputation in the industry, commitment to customer support, and track record of product development. Try to find out if companies like yours are part of their client base.
Enhance enterprise sales with an AI-powered CRM
Enterprise CRM FAQs
1. How does enterprise CRM differ from regular CRM?
Enterprise CRM systems are designed for large-scale operations, extensive customization, scalability, integration with third-party tools, and robust security measures, including multi-factor authentication. Unlike regular CRMs, they seamlessly support large data volumes, offer custom workflows, and facilitate collaboration across diverse departments.
2. Why is enterprise CRM software important for large companies?
CRM software is important for large enterprises as it centralizes customer data, streamlines communication, and boosts collaboration across departments, enhancing overall efficiency. It can automate crucial tasks, reduce redundant tasks, and offer strategic insights for maintaining competitiveness and improving customer service.
3. Is enterprise CRM software necessary for all businesses?
Not all businesses require enterprise CRM software. It's best suited for large or rapidly scaling medium-sized businesses that need extensive features to manage complex operations and large customer bases. Smaller businesses might benefit more from simpler, more cost-effective CRM solutions that match their scale and complexity.
4. What makes good enterprise CRM software?
A good enterprise CRM software should offer a comprehensive solution, including robust customization, advanced AI tools, seamless integration, advanced sales analytics and reporting capabilities. With data centers in the US, EU, IN, and ANZ, Freshsales helps enterprises become compliant. And with features like role-based access, territory management, field-level permissions, audit logs, and record scope, enterprises can add users to roles, specify permissions and define the scope of control. It ensures data security.
5. How can enterprise CRM drive sales growth?
Enterprise CRM systems boost sales by equipping teams with detailed customer insights and tools for personalized campaigns, efficient lead management, and automated sales processes. Features like smart forecasting and analytics support effective upselling and cross-selling strategies, driving revenue growth.
6. How does enterprise CRM software support multi-channel interactions?
Enterprise CRM solutions consolidate all customer interactions across various channels—such as email, social media, phone, and live chat—into a single platform. This unification ensures consistent messaging, enables real-time responses, and provides a holistic view of customer communications, enhancing the overall customer experience.
7. How can enterprise CRM improve customer relationships?
Enterprise CRM enhances customer relationships by personalizing communications using detailed profiles and interaction histories. It ensures timely follow-ups and prompt issue resolutions by maintaining consistent and positive interactions across all touchpoints, helping businesses deliver proactive and superior customer service.