Outside sales reps face many challenges when they are on their way to the field and when they are already in the field. A report stated, “Outside sales reps face more competition and rejection, as they have to convince prospects to meet them face-to-face and overcome their objections. They also spend a lot of time on the road.”
To tackle this issue, outside sales reps should consider CRMs with perfect route optimization and customer retention capability to reduce stress and enable them to meet their company targets. We’ve conducted intensive research and found out that the ten best CRMs for outside sales reps detailed in this article were able to tackle the problem.
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So, what is the best CRM for outside sales reps?
HubSpot CRM is the best as it enables outside sales reps to build and strengthen customer relationships.
Most of the time, product vendors want to collect payments before releasing their products to sales reps, and only customers who trust you can leave their money with you before receiving their products. So, HubSpot CRM enables you to build trust with your customers. It also helps you understand your customers’ preferences and provide them with their needed products.
Below is a list of powerful CRMs for outside sales reps:
- Hubspot CRM- Best for Strengthening Relationship
- Service Monster- Best for Route Optimization
- Field Complete- Best for Budget option
- Pipedrive–Best for sales
- Zoho–Best for Customization
- Freshsales –Best for sales sequencing
- Monday– Best for Customer Service
- Salesforce– Third-party integration
- Salesmate– Best for Extra feature
- Capsule– Best for usability
Best CRMs for Outside Sales Reps
1. Hubspot CRM- Best for Strengthening Relationship
HubSpot CRM is a cloud-based platform generally known for its ability to nurture leads, a crucial quality for outside sales reps aiming to strengthen customer relationships.
The idea here is that HubSpot CRM allows you to send educational content to your leads to keep them engaged. The more they return for more educational content, the more they trust you and become convinced that your product is good. This enables the sales rep to earn more commission from the company producing the product and meet their target.
With HubSpot CRM, you can convert your website visitors into leads and nurture them as clients, but customization functions are needed to suit industry needs. Any outside sales rep who recognizes that customers are at the heart of their business should consider using it. It is also very beneficial for any new user.
How HubSpot CRM Benefits Outside Sales Reps
Relationship Tracking:
Having a long list of customers may sound like the dream for any outside sales rep, but handling customer relationships can become a nightmare without a sound business structure. HubSpot CRM allows you to gather insights to better understand your customer’s behaviours and preferences. With this data, you can discover who your customers are, what they need from you, and how to provide them with the best possible experience.
Live Chat:
HubSpot CRM enables you to have real-time conversations with potential and existing customers, potentially leading to more conversions and sales. Your sales team can gain a wealth of knowledge about customers’ behaviour, preferences, and trends. Additionally, they can use this information to create targeted marketing campaigns and sales strategies.
Territory Management:
When discussing outside sales, territory management is essential. Not all products sell in every territory. HubSpot CRM enables you to understand the types of products needed in a particular area. This optimization allows you to focus your time and efforts on the products or services required for those areas. It also lets you compare sales statistics between different territories, identifying those showing positive dynamics (sales growth) and those declining, helping build accurate sales forecasts for each territory.
Pricing details
- Starter: $20/mo billed at $360 $240/yr
- Professional: $1,600/mo billed at $21,360 $19,201/yr
Free Plan: Available
2. Service Monster- Best for Route Optimization
ServiceMonster is an all-in-one customer relationship management software for field service professionals. Top outside sales reps consider it an excellent software solution due to its perfect route optimization capability.
Most outside sales reps spend a lot of time in the car; every second they consume, there is a second they need to pay with customers. ServiceMonster helps them devise and optimize the shortest route to their customer’s shops, reducing the cost of travelling and allowing them to spend less time on the road and more time with their customers.
Additionally, the route optimization process can be complicated and time-consuming to do manually, but with ServiceMonster, everything is completed in seconds. This great software is a perfect CRM solution for anyone in the field. However, its drip campaigns and other marketing features may take time to understand.
Employee Management, Employee Scheduling, Fleet Management, Field Service, Janitorial Services, Pest Control Companies, GPS, Geographic Maps, and Historical Reporting are its other benefits.
How ServiceMonster CRM Benefits Outside Sales Reps
Quote/Estimates:
ServiceMonster allows you to provide quick and easy estimates during sales in the field. This helps you win more customers and meet your quarterly targets.
Route Planning:
With ServiceMonster, outside sales reps can easily plan and devise the shortest and best route to their customers’ destinations. This reduces the time spent on the road and increases the time spent with customers.
Reminder:
Outside sales reps often send reminder emails to their clients for essential actions such as product requests or invoice payments. ServiceMonster automates sending these emails, reducing the stress of manual communication.
Pricing details
- Basic: $39/Month 1 User License
- Grow: $105/Month 5 User Licenses
- Premier: $159/Month 10 User Licenses
Free Trial: Available
3. Field Complete- Best for Budget option
Field Complete is a powerful CRM software that can help you streamline your sales process, improve customer engagement, and assist outside sales reps in meeting their targets. It is a single tool that unifies your sales process under one platform, covering everything from customer outreach and closing deals to analytics. It serves as the ultimate navigator in the intricate world of managing field service operations.
The good news is that it’s free, and free users have no limits compared to others. As a free CRM, it allows outside sales reps to manage customer relationships without incurring additional expenses. This is especially helpful for newly employed outside sales reps. If you require other features, you can upgrade to a paid plan as time passes.
The downside of Field Complete CRM is that it only runs the business independently, with the user involved. An updated version of it may address this bug.
How Field Complete CRM Benefit Outside Sales Reps
Invoice Management:
Inefficiency in invoice management can lead to errors and late invoice payments, costing you lots of money. Field Complete CRM automates your sales invoice process completely, reducing errors.
Location Tracking:
Field Complete CRM uses GPS to track the location of the customer. Its technology can pinpoint the target location’s longitude, latitude, ground speed, and course direction. This helps you gain real-time visibility into sales activities occurring at that location.
Email Marketing:
Field Complete CRM allows you to use consistent emails like “We miss you!” to regain customers who have fallen off the grid and lure them back. Sending these regular emails boosts customer retention and encourages them to purchase more.
Other key benefits of this CRM include job scheduling, location tracking, maintenance scheduling, messaging, mobile access, mobile alerts, and multi-location.
Pricing details
- Bronze: $19.99 per month
- Silver $99.99 per month
- Gold $199.99per month Platinum
Free Plan: Yes
4. Pipedrive–Best for sales
Pipedrive CRM is a cloud-based customer relationship management solution that streamlines the sales process. Salespeople designed it to help outside sales reps make more sales and reach their targets.
It’s highly recommended for outside sales reps who want to focus more on their job’s lead generation and sales aspects, especially those with limited technical support. Pipedrive’s feature of having a ready-to-use standard sales pipeline that can be easily updated to suit your needs sets it apart from others.
Pipedrive also organizes leads to ensure you always have an excellent sales overview, prioritizing essential deals. It boasts great email functionality, but it lacks a shared inbox. This creates separation between the sales team and their customers, as they can’t rely on Pipedrive for email communication.
How Pipedrive CRM benefits Outside Sales Reps
Sales Planning:
Pipedrive CRM allows you to view your customers’ appointment schedules and the potential of various locations. This enables you to place the right members of your sales team where they are most needed, optimizing your team’s performance. It also evaluates the company to understand its position in the marketplaces.
Sales Pipeline Management:
Outside sales reps use Pipedrive CRM to track sales opportunities from start to finish, analyzing failures and successes to make improvements. When done effectively, it helps them define ideal sales strategies for gaining more sales and meeting monthly targets.
Sales Reports:
Pipedrive CRM helps you monitor your sales performance, plan effective sales strategies, decide on a sales forecasting process, and, most importantly, maintain or reduce the sales cycle length.
Pricing details
- Essential US$9.90 Per user per month, billed annually
- Advanced US$19.90 Per user per month, billed annually
- Power US$49.90 Per user per month, billed annually
- Enterprise US$59.90 Per user per month, billed annually
Free Plan: Available
5. Zoho - Best for Customization
Zoho CRM is a highly customizable customer relationship management software that helps outside sales reps cope with expansion challenges. It truly shines when it comes to engaging with prospective customers. Zoho CRM offers many customization options that can be leveraged to fit your sales processes.
This CRM allows you to create a page tailored to your sales needs and save it as a template. Its vast customization options are more extensive than those of other CRMs. We appreciate that all Zoho CRM tiers provide customization options, including custom fields and list views. Zoho is an excellent platform for sales reps, but its workflow could be better and more intuitive.
How Zoho CRM benefits Outside Sales Rep
Customizable Reports:
Zoho CRM enables you to monitor your productivity to ensure you’re on top. It provides a top-level overview of all the activity completed on your OnePageCRM account. You can generate and save email reports tailored to your needs.
Customizable Templates:
Zoho CRM Custom templates are pages (or groups of pages) you create and then save as templates. This is an effective way to set up pages with shared content, layout, or sub-page hierarchy.
Performance Analysis:
Zoho CRM is a powerful tool that helps outside sales reps gain fuller visibility into their strengths and weaknesses. Using Zoho CRM software, outside sales reps can optimize their sales, marketing, and customer service approaches to better reach and provide reports that interest their customers.
Pricing details
- Standard US$14 /user/month billed annually
- Professional US$23 /user/month billed annually
- Enterprise US$40 /user/month billed annually
- Ultimate US$52 /user/month billed annually
Free Trial: 14 Days
6. Freshsales –Best for sales sequencing
Freshsales is an all-in-one customer relationship software that maximizes productivity, streamlines sales processes, and enhances pipeline visibility for outside sales reps. It prioritizes sales sequencing. When planning to reach out to customers several times over the next few weeks, creating new emails each time can be time-consuming. Freshsales reduces this stress with its sequencing capability, preventing a repetition of information and avoiding the possibility of sending a meeting request when one is already scheduled.
The only downside of this platform is that the reporting system could be better; you cannot rely on it to provide accurate reports.
How Freshsales CRM Benefits Outside Sales Reps
Lead Management:
Using CRM software like Freshsales, you can track all meaningful leads, move them along the sales pipeline, and ultimately make sales. It also prevents leads from slipping through the cracks and keeps you communicating with significant leads.
Lead Segmentation:
Freshsales CRM allows you to break your collection of leads into smaller lists based on their actions, enabling you to send more convincing marketing messages. It also allows you to address specific needs, showing people which problems you will solve for them or giving them any reason to believe they should buy from you.
Sales Analysis:
Freshsales CRM helps you review your sales figures regularly to identify trends and patterns. Sales data can assist you in making better decisions about your product, pricing, promotions, inventory, customer needs, and other aspects of your pressure washing business.
Sales Sequencing:
A sales sequence, a sales cadence or a sales campaign is a series of clearly delineated steps to convert your prospects into paying customers. Sales sequences usually consist of five to seven steps and take an omnichannel approach. The Sequences feature in Freshsales allows you to automate your sales outreach, keeping interactions personalized at all sales process stages.
Pricing details
- Growth $15 /user/month, billed annually
- Pro $39 /user/month, billed annually
- Enterprise $69 /user/month, billed annually
Free plan ;Available
7. Monday– Best for Customer Service
Monday CRM is a solution that empowers outside sales reps to take control of their entire sales cycle. It allows you to access all relevant customer information and every interaction you’ve had with them, all in a single view.
Monday sales CRM offers various support options: Email/Help Desk, FAQs/Forum, Knowledge Base, 24/7 (Live rep), and Chat. Any sales rep in the field who wants free 24/7 access to customer support and visibility into their sales pipeline to boost productivity should consider Monday CRM software.
You can submit your questions and details through their contact page, and a representative will get back to you immediately. The most challenging aspect of this software was the integration of Gmail.
How Monday CRM Benefits Pressure Washing Businesses:
Customer Support Portals:
Monday CRM has a self-serve, web-based customer service tool where your customers can get help quickly. Monday CRM support portals enable customers to find information, request support, and resolve issues online efficiently and autonomously.
Customer History:
Monday CRM provides a customer’s relationship history in just a few steps. With customer history at your fingertips, you can see when you reached the customer. A few months ago, a consumer may have been interested in your service and wanted to wait to buy it.
Live Chat:
Monday CRM allows you to have real-time conversations with potential and existing customers, making more customers interested in your products. Integrating live chat with your CRM can benefit your business, allowing you to gather and store information from all the investors you have been chatting with.
Other features include a contact database, contact management, email management, sales reports, communication management, etc.
Pricing details
- Basic $12seat /month Total $36/ month for three seats Billed annually
- Standard $17 seat/month Total $51/month for three seats Billed annually
- Pro $28 seat/ month Total $84/month for three seats Billed annually
- Enterprise: contact sales
Free Plan: Yes
8. Salesforce– Third-party integration
Salesforce is a top cloud-based CRM software provider in the international market. The Salesforce CRM requires no technical knowledge to set up or manage. It is an ideal tool for outside sales reps, giving them a complete view of their pipeline and understanding how their business is doing. It tracks the journey of leads in the pipeline to check whether they are reaching their destination.
Integrating third-party apps can open up a new range of ideas you didn’t previously have. These ideas can be translated into new services. As a Salesforce CRM user, you can easily connect to other applications through third-party integration. You can connect to Google Drive, DocuSign, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Google Ads, MailChimp, HubThunder, Adobe Sign, PandaDoc, and many more with REST services.
The only negative aspect I’ve encountered while utilizing Salesforce is that saving entered data is not done automatically and can lead to losing work.
How Salesforce CRM Benefits Outside Sales Reps
Social Media Integration:
Salesforce CRM allows outside sales reps to capture insights from social media accounts, monitor brand mentions across platforms, and identify posts with the highest engagement. You can connect an app for scheduling posts and use CRM data to pinpoint the best times to post.
Form Builder Integration:
Information from web forms is automatically added to your Salesforce CRM. There’s no need for manual entry or forms siloed in another part of the system. The tools sync the data so that you can match contacts and avoid duplication.
Email Integration:
Integrating your email platform will automatically log your emails in the Salesforce CRM, plus you can import contact data. You’ll also have access to CRM data from your inbox, so there’s no need to spend time searching. With Salesforce CRM, you can set up email automation based on customer behaviour, such as browsing history or abandoned shopping carts.
Free Plan: Yes
9. Salesmate CRM — (Best for Extra Features)
Salesmate CRM is a full-stack CRM suite that allows outside sales reps to streamline their sales processes collaboratively. Over 100,000 companies globally use Salesmate as one of the most preferred CRMs for field sales reps. It empowers them to automate repetitive tasks, gain deeper insights into their audience, manage leads, and delight their audience.
Getting enough traffic for your site may take a lot of work. The lack of detailed information can damage your lead generation, so Salesmate CRM has an extra feature that makes your invisible network visible to the customer and lets you see each connection’s outcome. The only thing that needs to be added in Salesmate is a voicemail drop option compared to other CRMs.
How Salesmate CRM benefits Outside Salesmate Reps
Location Tracking:
Salesmate CRM uses GPS to track the traffic in your customer’s location. It also enables you to gain real-time visibility into activities going on there. Salesmate’s technology can pinpoint the target path.
Pipeline and Deals:
With Salesmate CRM, you can visualize, track, and organize your sales process and pipelines. It comes with featured tags to enable you to name your contacts according to their stages in the life cycle.
Automation:
Salesmate’s automation feature helps you improve your workflow, save time, and cut operating expenses. You can also set triggers and desired actions that automate your routine tasks.
Insights and Reporting:
A firm can only do with actionable customers and insights. So, Salesmate CRM provides these insights with little or no extra effort.
Pricing details
- Basic $23 per user/ month
- Pro $39 per user/ month
- Business $63 per user/ month
- Enterprice: contact sales team
Free Trial: 14 Days
10. Capsule– Best for usability
Capsule is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform that is well-suited for outside sales reps to simplify and effectively generate more customers. Capsule CRM is in the top tier for its usability; its easy automation saves outside sales reps 10 hours per week by eliminating manual tasks such as sending texts and recording new leads immediately after they complete a form on your landing page or social media account.
Setting up Capsule CRM is also very easy, as it has how-to-do videos that can assist you. Its simple drag-and-drop sales pipeline builders make it easy to stay organized. It also provides a clear picture of your business, but the free version was so restricted it made it virtually useless
How Capsule CRM benefits Outside Sales Reps
Freddy AI:
Improve your productivity with the power of artificial intelligence. Capsule CRM gives you intelligent suggestions and insights on your traffic generation, auto-detects duplicate contacts, predictive lead scoring, lead-generation bot, and more.
User Management:
Over time, you will have a sales team that comes and goes. Capsule CRM makes it easy to add new members and decommission inactive users. Here, you have complete control over your sales accounts.
Pricing details
- Starter $18 Per user, per month. Billed Annually.
- Growth $36 Per user, per month. Billed Annually.
- Advanced $54 Per user, per month . Billed Annually
- Ultimate $72 Per user, per month. Billed Annually.
Free Trial: 14 Days
Final Thoughts On The Best CRM For Outside Sales Reps
Getting the best CRM as an outside sales rep would help you identify the best route to your customer’s location and minimize your time on the road. For perfect route optimization, go for Service Monster.
More customers buying from you means more sales, and this helps outside sales reps meet their target and earn more incentives. HubSpot CRM is the game-changer for maintaining customers and winning their sales.
Newly employed outside sales reps should go for Field Complete CRM as it is free, and free users have no limits.
You can scroll up to get the details of all the ten best CRMs for outside sales reps listed in this article.
