Free vs. Paid: Marketing and Business Intelligence Tools

March 1, 2017

If you’re in business as an entrepreneur or small business owner, your mailbox is probably full of offers trying to sell you marketing and business intelligence tools. The trouble is, how do you know which services are worth the money, and which ones have a free competitor that will work for you until you start generating revenue? We’re looking at eight marketing and business intelligence tools in four areas — CRM, CMS & inbound, project management and sales intelligence — to give you the scoop on which ones are Harry Kane and which ones are Wayne Rooney.

Customer Relationship Management Tools

Zoho vs Salesforce - Business Intelligence ToolsTracking your sales opportunities is vital for timing outreach and knowing how long your sales cycle is, not to mention pipeline volume and velocity. If you’re selling anything you need a customer relationship management (CRM) system to stay on top of your sales efforts.

Consistently rated as a top 10 place to work in the UK, Salesforce is also the leading product in customer relationship management. Salesforce uses a “per user, per month” pricing structure with tiers ranging from £20/user/month for tracking opportunities and some prebuilt dashboards, to £240/user/month for the Unlimited Edition, which offers forecasting, rules based workflows, custom dashboards and a ton of other functions. But with 10 users, that’s £2,400 per month in expenditure.

ZOHO CRM, on the other hand, is free for up to 10 users, and the top tier of pricing (CRM Plus) tops out at €50/agent/month. The free version offers tracking at lead, contact, account and opportunity levels; email templates, lead forms and some limited workflow functionality. Upgrades across a wide array of functions are available at €12, €25 and €50 per user per month.

Winner: ZOHO for free (Salesforce if you decide to pay)

Content Marketing & Marketing Automation Tools

Pimcore vs. HubSpot - Business Intelligence ToolsBehavioural triggers have become the norm for nurture campaigns and warming up prospects. From site visitors to asset downloaders, understanding what collateral resonates with your audience – and how to personalise and follow up that engagement with additional targeted content – is an industry best practice for inbound marketers.

HubSpot offers a set of tools to publish your website, track visitors, capture leads, serve landing pages and offer downloadable assets, along with email list management, segmentation and content distribution and measurement. But for a list size of more than 1,000, website and reporting add-ins, you’re looking at a plan priced at just under £25,000 per year, and that’s not including the £3,500 onboarding fee. To call it prohibitively expensive for most startups is an understatement.

Pimcore is open source, and for that reason alone, it’s not going to appeal to everyone: there are technical considerations like the files need to be installed in the document root of your web server and you’ll need to set up the database (talk to your IT professional about that), and when anyone can create code, you need to be extra careful about what you install. On the other hand, it’s completely free.

But what does it do?

At its core (see what I did there?), it offers product information management and master data management tools, content management and digital asset management, along with e-commerce options. As far as content management goes, Pimcore offers website publishing, email marketing automation, content personalisation and analytics, and even publishing options across multiple channels from a single source. If you don’t have £28,000 to spend on those tools this year, and have the technical know-how available to you, Pimcore is a powerful competitor to the high price content systems out there.

Winner: Draw – depends whether you want to spend the money on setup or technical staff

Project Management Tools

Bitrix24 vs Basecamp - Business Intelligence Tools

Providing a way for interested constituents to maintain and monitor the work of your internal functions, from marketing to creative to account services, is the best way to have accurate information when your boss asks for status updates. Both Basecamp and Bitrix quote prices in $US, but for customers outside the US, the payment processor will charge you whatever the cost in $US is in your local currency.

Basecamp is the gold standard for project management and collaboration, but it runs at $99 per month, which can be enough to dissuade solopreneurs, small shops and startups.

As an alternative, Bitrix24 offers many of the same functions including calendars, document sharing (up to 5GB total storage), versioning, CRM and sales automation, Gantt charts and projects with up to 5 dependencies.

You can add more storage, external users, workflow automation and unlimited dependencies if you subscribe to the Plus ($39/month) or Standard ($99/month) versions. If you want to add in reporting and time tracking, your price jumps to $199. Discounts for paying ahead are available.

Bitrix24 also partner with Intreface in the UK. Intreface offers pricing in $US, £GB and €EU for Bitrix24 implementation and custom development.

Winner: Bitrix24 for free (Basecamp if you decide to pay)

Sales Intelligence Tools

Google Alerts vs Winmo - Business Intelligence Tools

In sales, one of the most frustrating parts of the job is that you rarely get a decision maker on the phone right away. Big companies have gatekeepers, while managers at smaller companies are wearing so many hats they’re often simply unreachable. More than this, knowing when to time your outreach so you’re pitching services when your target might be interested – like when they’re in budget planning – is guess work for most sales professionals.

This is where Winmo and DailyVista succeed. Winmo is packed with information for sales professionals who target national advertisers: planning periods, prior year budgets and spending analysis by channel, filters that allow you to home in on niche markets, verticals or geographies. And at the click of a button subscribers get access to human-verified direct dial phone numbers and emails for decision makers that match their search criteria. DailyVista, Winmo’s daily email newsletter, offers actionable insights from its news gathering team which contextualizes earnings calls, fiscal reporting, movement in the C-suite and startup funding announcements. A subscription to Winmo and Daily Vista will set you back £4,350 per year for 2 users, with each additional seat costing £300 per year.

The free alternative to Winmo’s sales intelligence platform is Google Alerts and LinkedIn. I know that sounds like a win, because Google is brilliant, but to be effective you’ll need to set alerts for specific things like “earnings call” and “series A funding” and “promoted to CMO” – which means you’ll need to know which alerts you need, then spend time setting those alerts up, and then spend time on a daily or weekly basis reading them to see what insights you can glean from them. If you’re in sales, you’ll understand that every hour you spend on activities that don’t generate revenue, you’re missing out on sales calls that could win you business, and this manual alerts system — while it’s free — will quickly cost you in lost revenue opportunities.

If you choose the Google Alerts path, you’re also going to have to dig up contact information for the decision makers you plan to reach out to. Company About Us pages will just land you in front of a gatekeeper, while LinkedIn profiles are likely to be out of date – and do you really want to cold call your target’s personal mobile?

Winner: Winmo — While most of the free services mentioned here give the paid service a run for its money, when it comes to sales intelligence, there’s no substitute for Winmo. 

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