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Finding the right CRM software can be tricky without the right tools.
With so many choices, it’s easy to go through dozens of duds, wasting time and money that could be spent on your business.
I’m AJ—here to help you narrow it down. Over the last decade, I built and sold my business (in a successful seven-figure exit) using all kinds of sales tools.
Now, I’m using Small Business Bonfire (SBB) to impart what I learned to fellow entrepreneurs. The goal is simple—to get you to where I am (faster) without making the same mistakes.
So let’s talk about a CRM that I think is fantastic—Apptivo. The SBB team and I tested the software over three months to bring you this comprehensive Apptivo CRM review.
There’s a lot to cover, so let’s dig in!
FYI—we curated a list of the best Small Business CRM software. Check it out when you’re finished reading!
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Since 2009 SBB has been testing and rating software. If you’re curious to know how we test, please read this article here.
Apptivo is a cloud-based, all-in-one customer relationship management (CRM) software made up of the following modules:
SalesFinancialsMarketingProduct ManagementProject ManagementHuman Resources
Apptivo CRM is a robust platform that wears many hats, but don’t worry; we’ll break each down for you.
How it works is that each pricing plan contains a certain amount of available Apptivo apps. Each application is essentially its own separate feature.
We’ll give you an overview of the following Apptivo features (or apps):
Lead managementContact managementEmail campaign managementTestimonialsInvoicesExpense reportsIdeasPatentsProjectsTimesheetsRecruitmentTeams
Whew! Talk about a feature-rich platform that does it all. During our three months of testing, we were consistently blown away by the power of the CRM solution.
When you factor in that it’s also very affordable, it’s easy to see why Apptivo is one of our favorite platforms on the market.
It’s fantastic for small and midsize businesses (SMBs) looking for an all-in-one powerhouse CRM solution to scale with.
It’s also a perfect fit for sales and marketing teams looking to improve the entire customer lifecycle from start to finish.
As we touched on, Apptivo comprises a suite of applications that work together to provide an efficient CRM solution.
Let’s look at each module (and its associated apps) in the overall Apptivo CRM platform.
Apptivo’s Sales offering is perfect for scaling your small business, nurturing leads, and managing contacts.
Marketing through Apptivo gives you all the tools you need to empower your marketing teams.
Financials is an all-in-one money management system with a surprising amount of customization.
Project Management makes it easy to get your entire team on the same page with your all your projects!
Apptivo’s Human Resources application makes it super easy to find the right candidates for the job!
Sales with Apptivo is essentially the sales CRM branch of the overall platform.
Here, you can manage leads and customers in one place, track sales activities, manage all your business contracts, and empower your sales teams to succeed.
Some features offered by Sales include the following:
Lead managementOpportunity managementContractsContact center (calls & SMS)Contact management
This leg of Apptivo is fantastic for keeping leads and customer information organized and nurturing customer relationships.
Lead management is a vital part of any successful CRM program.
With this feature, we could easily add and manage our affiliate marketing leads in one place.
We started by clicking the “create” button to add our first lead.
Here’s how it looked (to give you a better idea).
One aspect of lead management with Apptivo that we thought was awesome was just how in-depth the lead creation was.
We’ve tested dozens of CRM platforms with Small Business Bonfire, and it’s pretty common to just have a few fields available. With Apptivo, that couldn’t be further from the case.
To give you an idea of how comprehensive it was, here are some of the fields we filled out with each new lead:
Lead statusLead sourceBest way to contactType of leadAssociated campaignAssociated businessSocial media accountsRank
There’s a lot more, but suffice it to say—when you input a lead with Apptivo Sales, you’ll be able to give your entire team an overview of everything short of their whole life story.
Plus, in addition to manually entering leads, it was incredibly simple to capture new leads from our website with Apptivo’s web capture forms (via their WordPress integration).
Once we downloaded the plugin, titled “Apptivo Business Site CRM” (shown below), we were in business!
All in all, lead management with Apptivo Sales is impressive, to say the least. Our only issue with this feature is that it was slightly difficult to find some of the more advanced tools, such as web form creation.
If you’re new to CRM, we recommend at least watching a few videos and reading some of their helpful articles before you get started.
CRM software is designed to make customer interactions easier—and Apptivo does just that.
The contact management app helps you to do the following with ease:
Track the entire lifecycle of each contactBuild and nurture relationshipsMaintain data accuracy
Throughout our three-month testing period, we found importing and creating new contact data with Apptivo very simple.
Just like with their lead management, Apptivo’s new contact forms are in-depth, with a ton of customization options, allowing for a level of personalization that we found invaluable to SMBs.
For example, with just a click, we were able to create and customize new categories for each contact (pictured below).
This feature is great for large companies that need powerful customer segmentation tools at their disposal.
Speaking of segmentation, Apptivo also offers a fantastic method of sorting through many contacts called “Lists.”
With Lists, you can easily filter by the following metrics:
Unresponded contactsBounced contactsDirectoryCategoryStatusTags
This makes it easy for your team to find exactly what they’re looking for (without the monotony of manually sorting through thousands of contacts).
Here’s our dashboard view once we finished adding some B2B affiliate marketing contacts from Small Business Bonfire.
Our takeaway: Regarding contact management, Apptivo delivers the goods (and then some). With the ability to store a ton of customer data in a way that’s easy to customize, segment, and search for, it’s easily some of the best in the biz.
When it comes to managing your finances, Apptivo has you covered with Apptivo Financials.
Say goodbye to cumbersome spreadsheets and tedious data entry as Apptivo’s Financials offers the following features:
BookkeepingInvoicingReportingPropertiesCash managementFundraising
The best part of managing your money alongside your CRM is that you don’t need to navigate between multiple platforms (or hire an accountant) to stay on top of your finances.
Let’s get into some features!
Allow me to regale you with a tale of how my team at Small Business Bonfire and I put Apptivo’s invoicing feature to the test (or we can just tell you).
We began by creating invoices for some of our affiliate marketing clients. The process was smoother than a freshly-mowed lawn.
With Apptivo’s invoicing feature, we could quickly and effortlessly create, pay, and track invoices for our clients.
But it didn’t stop there – oh no. We also used Apptivo’s invoicing feature to manage our own internal financials.
We created invoices for our writing and editorial staff (shown below) and were pleased to find that we could easily view everything in our customizable dashboard.
And let me just say importing our invoices was a breeze.
We were able to import them from the following locations with ease:
ProjectsOrdersOur timesheetOur workbench requests
Talk about flexibility!
Overall, we were thoroughly impressed with Apptivo’s invoicing feature. It made our lives much easier and streamlined our financial processes like nobody’s business.
If you’re an SMB looking for a CRM that’s got your financial needs covered, Apptivo is the way to go. Trust me, your wallet (and sanity) will thank you.
With Apptivo’s expense report creation and tracking, gone are the days of disorganized, crumpled-up receipts and guessing how much you spent on that business trip.
Apptivo’s expense reports allow you to easily track every penny spent and categorize expenses across multiple sales pipelines within the platform.
So, say goodbye to the hassle of manually adding every coffee, taxi, and hotel bill, and hello to an automated, streamlined process.
Plus, you can generate comprehensive expense reports with just a few clicks, making it easier for you to submit your expenses for reimbursement or tax purposes.
Put simply—Apptivo’s Financials expense reports feature is a game-changer for SMBs looking to streamline their expense tracking processes.
Apptivo’s Marketing module handles (you probably guessed it) the marketing side of the CRM system.
This aspect of the all-in-one CRM platform offers the following features:
TestimonialsEmail campaign creationTarget audiencesPromotionsLoyalty managementInsights
If you’re looking to up your marketing game, Apptivo offers some helpful tools to make it happen.
It’s worth noting, however, that we would have liked to see a few more features here, such as the following:
A/B testingLanding page creationAd creation/management
With the powerful testimonials tool, collecting and displaying glowing reviews from your cherished clients has never been easier!
Gone are the days of manually copying and pasting quotes into your website or sales materials only to have them scattered everywhere.
With Apptivo Marketing’s Testimonial feature, you can seamlessly store and showcase your most flattering reviews in one centralized location.
And we all know how important those testimonials can be, right? They can make or break a business!
Here’s one from a client at SBB, whose business we helped scale drastically over just a few months.
Once you’ve input all your testimonials, you can select the best quotes to showcase on your website or promotional materials, and voila! You’ve got instant credibility with potential customers.
So, don’t underestimate the power of a good testimonial! Your business (and your future clients) will thank you.
At Small Business Bonfire, we love a good email campaign.
So we were pretty thrilled to learn that Apptivo CRM makes it easy to create, schedule, and send off campaigns to clients!
We started by navigating to the Campaigns app and clicking the “create” button.
We were offered the option to create a regular or quick campaign. During our three months of testing, we took advantage of both options quite a bit.
However, we’ll go over the more detailed campaign option for this section of the review.
Then, we filled out the following fields:
Campaign nameAssigned userStart and end dateDescriptionAssociated tags
In our case, we created a simple campaign to greet new subscribers to our SBB newsletter titled Bonfire Field Guide.
We called the campaign “Welcome to Bonfire Nation.” Here’s our creation screen to give you a better idea of what we’re talking about.
From there, all we had to do was create a schedule for the campaign, customize our template, and then we were sending welcome emails to our new subscribers left and right!
Overall, we would have liked to see a drag-and-drop email template creation like many of the CRMs we’ve tested offer, but Apptivo certainly got the job done at the end of the day.
Apptivo isn’t just any old CRM software – they boast an impressive suite of human resources tools that will make your head spin—in a good way, of course.
Some HR tools offered by Apptivo include:
Candidate managementRecruitmentTeamsEmployee management
They even have a snazzy, intuitive HR dashboard for your HR team to manage all of their tasks in one place.
So if you’re tired of juggling multiple systems and spreadsheets just to keep your HR department afloat, Apptivo’s HR tools might be the lifesaver you’ve been looking for. Let’s take a closer look, shall we?
At Small Business Bonfire, we understand the struggle of finding the perfect candidates to join our team.
That’s why we were thrilled to test out Apptivo CRM’s recruitment feature (and we were impressed, to say the least).
With Apptivo’s recruitment capabilities, we were able to create and customize positions for each job opening we needed to fill.
Not only were we able to name each position, but we were also able to categorize it based on its job function or skill set.
Here’s an example of the editorial staff position we were able to create (in just a matter of minutes).
Looking for a way to boost your team’s productivity? Apptivo CRM has got you covered with their Teams feature! This nifty tool allows you to create, manage and coordinate teams with ease.
With Apptivo’s Teams, you can have your employees work together seamlessly (like the Avengers, just a lot less cool).
You can make sure that everyone is on the same page and that no one is left out of important conversations or decisions.
With the capability to assign specific email addresses to each team, communication has never been easier.
Want your sales team to have their own email address? Done. Need a separate inbox for your marketing department? No problem.
So, whether you’re part of an SMB or a growing enterprise, Apptivo CRM’s Teams feature is a must-have tool.
With all of these features to streamline communication and decision-making, you can sit back and watch your team’s productivity soar!
Are you tired of managing your products in separate spreadsheets or apps?
Look no further than Apptivo’s all-in-one CRM solution, which includes innovative features to streamline your product management process.
Introducing Apptivo’s Product Management set of applications, the one-stop shop for all your product needs.
Here are some of the great features offered by Apptivo’s Product Management:
IdeasRequirementsItemsPatents
With Product Management from Apptivo, you’ll have everything you need to manage your products in one place.
Say goodbye to scattered information and hello to organized and efficient product management.
Have a new product idea? Apptivo allows you to capture and track all of your ideas in one central location.
No more lost napkin sketches or forgotten brainstorming sessions.
We got started by creating a new idea that we titled “Online Course: Starting a Business” (shown below).
The purpose of this idea would be to empower entrepreneurs to start their own businesses by providing all of the tips and tricks needed to get started.
With Apptivo’s idea creation tools, we were able to map out everything related to our idea, including the following:
DepartmentStart timeCostPotential savingsDescription of the ideaAssociated market
From there, our entire team could see each idea we created throughout our testing.
Ultimately, this feature isn’t anything fancy, but it is a great way to get everyone on the same page regarding your company’s vision moving forward.
If you’re looking for a way to brainstorm more effectively, we recommend you give this app from Apptivo a try!
Have you ever had a lightbulb moment and come up with a fantastic idea? Perhaps you’ve even gone so far as to turn that idea into a patent.
But then what? How do you keep track of all the paperwork, deadlines, and updates? Enter Apptivo CRM’s patent tracking feature.
The patent feature allows you to do the following with ease:
Keep track of upcoming expiration datesEasily access important patent informationSet the geographical scope of your patentQuickly assign users to each patent
No more sifting through mountains of paperwork or trying to remember which document is where. You can even set reminders and alerts to ensure you never miss a deadline and keep those patent trolls at bay.
But that’s not all! Apptivo also allows you to share access with team members and assign tasks related to your patents.
So, whether you need to collaborate with your attorney or work with your R&D team to make modifications, everyone can stay on the same page and ensure the success of your patent.
So, don’t let your brilliant ideas go to waste. Take advantage of Apptivo’s patent tracking feature and protect your intellectual property like a boss.
At Small Business Bonfire, we consider project management an essential feature of a great CRM.
Lucky for us, Project Management is a standout module in Apptivo’s overall suite of applications.
Some features under the umbrella of project management include the following:
ProjectsTimesheetsTest cyclesUser stories
Essentially, Apptivo gives you all the tools you need to empower your teams to succeed.
We got to work testing the platform’s capabilities by creating a project titled “new website design.” Here’s how it looked (to give you a better idea).
With Apptivo, we were able to easily add the following to each project:
Project nameStart and end dateStatusTagsCurrency typeBudgetProject manager
We especially loved how easy it was to create tasks for each project (screenshot below).
Once we had all our tasks input, we were able to view them in a helpful Gantt chart view, letting us visually track the progress of each project with zero ambiguity.
Overall, we found it incredibly easy to manage projects with Apptivo. The fact that we got some bonus task management within each project was the cherry on top!
Let’s talk about one of Apptivo’s features that gets overlooked amidst the flashier options—timesheets.
At Small Business Bonfire, we put it to the test, and boy, were we pleased with the results.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Timesheets? Yawn. I’d rather watch paint dry.” But trust me when I say this little gem is a game-changer.
The beauty of this feature lies in its simplicity. It’s like a pocket-sized Swiss Army knife that packs a punch.
With just a few clicks, you can track billable hours, record employee attendance, and generate detailed reports. Who knew keeping tabs on your team’s hours could be so easy?
The bottom line is this: Apptivo’s timesheets feature saves you time and money while also providing you with invaluable insights into your business. Whether you’re a solopreneur or managing a team, this tool is a must-have.
In order to give you the most transparent Apptivo review possible, we need to give the pros and the cons equal consideration.
Highly customizable dashboards
Powerful lead management
Email campaign management
Fantastic customer support
Great project management
Tons of productivity tools
There’s a bit of a learning curve to Apptivo
The UI could use an overhaul
List Item #3
List Item #3
Apptivo offers four paid pricing plans and a free one (that’s honestly pretty limited).
The plans are as follows:
Free – Free for 1 userLite – $8/monthPremium – $12/monthUltimate – $20/monthEnterprise – Contact sales
Let’s see how Apptivo stacks up against some of the most impressive CRMs on the market right now in terms of both features and pricing.
Apptivo – $8/month per user
Free for 1 userCustom fieldsCustom dashboards24/7 live chat supportProject, contact, lead, and deal management
HubSpot CRM – $50/month for 2 users
Free for 1 user10 custom fieldsLimited dashboard customizationLimited customer supportProject, contact, lead, and deal management
Insightly – $29/month per user
No free plan50 custom fieldsLimited dashboard customizationLimited customer supportProject, contact, lead, and deal management
Freshworks – $15/month per user
Free planLimited custom fieldsLimited dashboard customization24/7 customer supportProject, contact, lead, and deal management
If we’re talking about the most affordable CRM in this list, the clear winner is Apptivo at only $8/month per user. Compared to Freshworks, the second most affordable at $15/month, it’s nearly half as expensive.
In terms of features, Apptivo is also easily the most customizable and, therefore, wins out. I’d say that second place also goes to Freshworks regarding features, due to the fantastic free plan and amazing customer support.
Apptivo has many useful applications, but we’ll narrow it down in this section.
Here’s who we think it’s best suited for:
Small businesses – Apptivo offers many customization options, including the ability to create custom fields and personalize your CRM. This can be great for SMBs looking to fit their CRM to their business, not vice versa.Midsize businesses – Apptivo provides the ability to easily sort through contacts, projects, finances, and deals with ease. For growing businesses with an ever-increasing number of spinning plates, Apptivo makes it easy to keep up.Sales teams – With plenty of tools for sales planning, managing and nurturing leads, deal management.
While Apptivo may have a lot of practical applications, it’s not for everyone.
Here are some cases where Apptivo isn’t particularly well suited:
Startups – Due to the high learning curve for beginners and the limited free plan, it’s hard to recommend Apptivo to companies that are just starting out.Large Enterprises – Apptivo lacks some of the advanced workflow automation we’ve grown accustomed to at SBB. As a result, it can be difficult for large enterprises to keep up without these tools. Trust us when we say if you’re looking to streamline your enterprise, there are better tools out there.
At Small Business Bonfire, we don’t shy away from giving our honest opinion. So let’s talk about some of the limitations of the platform.
Limited sales and marketing automation – This isn’t the biggest limitation, in our opinion, but it’s worth pointing out that Apptivo lacks advanced workflow automation. While it does offer some automation, the ability to create and customize powerful automation would have been nice.The UI is difficult to navigate at times – We’ve tested a ton of CRMs at this point, and even we struggled with Apptivo throughout our testing. This is a pretty big limitation when it comes to those beginners using the platform. It becomes more manageable once you get past the learning curve, but we had to lean heavily on customer support during our three months of using the platform.
Now let’s look at what makes Apptivo stand out from the CRM crowd.
Fully customizable dashboards and fields – Apptivo allows you to create customized dashboards and fields tailored to your specific business needs. This makes it easy to track all the various metrics, customers, and deals associated with your business.Unique app-based approach – Apptivo takes an app-based approach to CRM management. This means that you can easily add, delete, or customize apps and features as needed without disrupting the core of your CRM.
The onboarding process with Apptivo was simple and straightforward. We navigated to their homepage (shown below), where we were greeted with a call to action (CTA) to sign up for a free trial.
We really liked the site’s design, especially how sleek and easy to read it was.
We put in our name and email to begin the onboarding process.
Once we verified our email, we were prompted to create a secure password.
From there, we filled out the following fields:
Business namePhone numberBusiness categoryCountryTimezone
We were also invited to schedule a demo with Apptivo, with an additional 7 days added to our free trial. Naturally, we took advantage of this before finishing the onboarding process.
After the demo, we were taken to the dashboard titled “My Agenda.” From there, we started adding leads and contacts, managing projects, and creating email campaigns.
Overall, onboarding with Apptivo had a very straightforward, no-frills approach that we thought was great!
Full transparency—Apptivo has a pretty steep learning curve to it. As we’ve said, we use and test CRMs frequently at Small Business Bonfire, and we still needed a lot of help using Apptivo.
Some of the advanced features are hidden in settings under tabs that aren’t obvious, but once we knew where to look, it got easier for our team.
I recommend fully customizing the CRM to fit your business before ever onboarding any new team members. That way, you can create a training program based on your custom fields and dashboards.
While the platform can be difficult to navigate for beginners, with the right coaching, it can be a great tool to manage every aspect of your business in one place.
During our testing, we’ll admit we got a little lost trying to navigate Apptivo (on more than one occasion).
However, each time we had a hiccup, we reached out to their support team for assistance, and like clockwork, we received an answer almost immediately.
We’re talking within less than a minute on most occasions. Their live chat support was fantastic in our estimation.
To test the responsiveness of the platform, we asked a quick question about creating web forms. Unsurprisingly, Apptivo responded in seconds with a helpful answer.
Overall, Apptivo knocked it out of the park when it came to customer service!
Apptivo does, in fact, have a mobile app available for both Android and iOS.
We downloaded it on iOS to see how everything looked and felt during our testing.
We’re happy to say that this mobile app isn’t some watered-down version of the web platform.
Oh no, it’s fully functional and jam-packed with features. You can view and manage leads, contacts, and customer accounts, create and send quotes/invoices, and even track time and expenses.
But that’s not all! With the Apptivo mobile app, you can collaborate with your team members in real time, receive push notifications for important updates, and access all your data on the go.
So, whether you’re on the train, at the beach, or just lounging on your couch, you can still stay connected and easily manage your business.
Apptivo’s mobile app is the perfect companion for the modern SMB owner who never stops hustling. Download it now and take your CRM game to the next level!
Let’s look at some of our favorite alternatives to Apptivo!
Apptivo is definitely worth it for small business owners that don’t mind a bit of a learning curve getting started.
Apptivo has a lot of helpful applications that allow for essentially complete customization of your CRM to fit your specific business needs.
So there you have it—our Apptivo review. We hope it helps you make an informed decision about which platform is the best for your SMB!
The post Apptivo CRM Review 2023: All In One CRM for SMBs appeared first on Small Business Bonfire.
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