Base CRM Review

Base CRM, which begins at $45 per user per month, does a good job at the small to midsized business (SMB) and customer relationship management (CRM) recipe: prune complex, advanced features so you can build an easy interface that won't scare off users new to CRM and cost lots of extra dollars for onboarding. The company succeeded there and even managed to sneak in some advanced analytics capabilities that don't gum up the easy interface as long as you're willing to invest some time in your reporting education to make them work. However, as your business grows and you want to add features, you'll find the price, which was already far from the cheapest in this roundup, rising even more. That and some feature weaknesses around customization keep it behind our Editors' Choice winners in this space, Salesforce Sales Cloud Lightning Professional and Zoho CRM.

While the higher price tag of Base might put you off, be aware that the company has thrown in several other capabilities that may make the dollars worth it to many, including lead management, deal tracking, an impressive set of communication tools, and more. So even with this higher price, the product remains competitive. If you've decided to purchase it, check out our PCMag Quick Start Guide that'll get you up and running with Base in 10 easy steps.

Overall, for companies looking to organize their sales pipeline, Base CRM is a fine choice for SMBs and even small to midsize enterprises (SMEs) with sales teams ranging in size from 20 users to workforces of 500-plus salespeople.

Base CRM Pricing

Base CRM offers three paid plans and a 14-day free trial. It has increased the pricing on all paid plans by $20 per user per month and all plans must have at least three users. The Starter plan ($45 per user per month) includes a customized sales pipeline, sales tracking and reporting, and a mobile CRM. The Professional plan ($95 per user per month) adds funnel forecasting, team performance analytics, task automation, and team document storage. Finally, the Enterprise plan ($145 per user per month) adds predictive sales intelligence, lead and deal scoring, multiple sales pipelines, and role-based permissions. Users can add on two platforms called Connect and Snap. Connect adds on email automation and smart dialers while Snap offers integrations and APIs to connect with your favorite third-party software. Both have free options, and paid options starting at $25 per user per month (billed annually).

You can sign up for the free trial, which includes all of the Enterprise plan's features, by clicking the Start Free Trial button at the top right-hand side of the home page. After providing your name and business email address and creating a password, you're ready to go. From the home page, you can also view pricing and information about the three aforementioned plans and compare their features. The free trial doesn't require a credit card number, which is always nice, and the amount of time left in your trial is displayed at the top of your account dashboard. Finally, you can also request a live demo of Base CRM by filling out a web form; the company will then send you a link to a prerecorded 30-minute webinar, which I found very helpful in getting the lay of the land.

Contacts, Leads, and Deals

When you log into your account for the first time, you can take a walkthrough of Base CRM's main features. Base CRM includes sample data so you can get a feel for what the UI looks like and how to interact with it. Once you're done with the walkthrough, you can remove the sample data and start adding your own. Thereafter, when you log in, you're brought to your account dashboard, which includes top-level information about your sales pipeline, active deals, tasks and upcoming appointments, and account activity.

On the top right-hand side is an icon with your initials; clicking on it on reveals a drop-down menu where you can access settings, manage your account, manage your repository (company documents), navigate to support, leave comments or suggestions, and read the privacy policy and terms of service. There are also links to Base CRM's mobile apps, an option to tweet about Base, view keyboard shortcuts, and log out. There are also tabs across the top of your dashboard for leads, contacts, sales pipeline, calendar, tasks, communication center, and reports.

You can add people and companies to your account either manually or by importing a CSV file. People must be labeled as either a lead (someone you haven't worked with yet) or a contact (someone with whom you're currently working or have done business). In Base CRM, a lead can be converted to a contact once they show interest; a contact can't be converted to a lead, though. When you convert a lead to a contact, Base CRM can automatically create a related deal at the same time. Once you've added people, you can upload documents to their record, which can be accessed on all of your devices. When you add a person, Base CRM will automatically create a company card as well.

If you upload a CSV file, you'll have to map the fields to Base CRM's fields. In most cases, Base CRM will determine a match; otherwise, you can choose a field from a drop-down list. You can also add unlimited custom fields, and filter by any field you add. Base CRM recommends uploading no more than 5,000 to 10,000 records at a time to avoid slowdowns.

Deals are stored in the Sales Pipeline tab and can be filtered by status. All records—leads, contacts, and deals—have cards on which you can view details and activity feeds. There can only be one owner per record, but if you have manager rights, you can add collaborators. A company card shows all of the employees in your database for your reference.

Once you have inputted all of your sales teams' data, you can use Base CRM to track communication with leads and contacts. You can connect your Gmail, Microsoft Outlook/Exchange, or Microsoft Office 365 ($99.99 at Microsoft Store) email account to Base CRM, and then track email correspondence, views, and clicks. You don't have to worry about your entire inbox cluttering your dashboard, though; Base will only display emails that are in your database in the communication center. Untracked emails are stored under a separate tab where you can add senders as contacts and leads, if applicable.

Base Voice is a cool feature with which you can call or text contacts and leads right from Base CRM. You can also record the audio of voice calls; all of this activity will be automatically recorded in Base CRM. You can also connect your Google Calendar to Base CRM to manage appointments and tasks; changes you make on one platform will synchronize with the other. The Calendar tab shows all appointments and tasks, which can be viewed by day, week, or month.

Reporting and Third-Party Integration

Base CRM offers a fairly substantial stable of reports, including pipeline analysis (sales funnel, pipeline development, and stage distribution reports), sales and goal performance reports breaking down total and forecasted sales, and won deal goals and sales revenue, in addition to more granular reports such as sales or loss reasons by owner and source. Each report can be filtered in a variety of ways to get as big or as small a picture you need.

Base CRM also includes more advanced reporting such as a sales rep performance dashboard, stage duration, time to first action, and marketing effectiveness measured by lead status, deal source, and total incoming deal reports. Base CRM also collects voice reports, analyzing metrics such as call volume and duration plotted against deal value and time of day. At the Professional and Enterprise tiers, users also gain access to the company's new predictive analytics reporting features: intelligent sales forecasting and email sentiment analysis.

Intelligent sales forecasting analyzes factors such as sales activity and deal velocity in a machine learning (ML) algorithm to generate a data-driven forecast, which includes an estimated close date and adjusted win likelihood. Email sentiment analysis uses natural language detection and predictive ML algorithms to analyze sales emails and detect positive, neutral, or negative sentiment. Triggers can then be created so a sales rep or their manager are alerted when important deals contain emails with negative sentiment. Sales Managers receive a push notification when deals above a specified value in the negotiation stage of the sales pipeline are in jeopardy of being lost, according to the predictive algorithm. This kind of sentiment analysis is something you see more of in social listening platforms, and represents a genuinely innovative step for Base in CRM reporting.

Base CRM also has mobile apps for Android and iOS; each offers activities, notifications, emailing and built-in templates, and offline access, along with a number of third-party integrations. Base CRM integrates with Dropbox, Google Apps and Drive, Harvest (a time-tracking tool), MailChimp, and Xero (for invoicing), along with a number of other tools including marketing automation software HubSpot, proposal creation software QuoteRoller, Zapier, and Zendesk, among others. The company also released the open-source Snap platform last year as well, which provides an API and integration platform of pre-built code libraries to enable additional integrations.

You can access support by clicking on your initials on the top right-hand side of the screen, which also leads to settings and account management. Under support, you can access the knowledge base, video guides, an idea board (i.e., customer feedback forums and ideas powered by UserVoice.com). From the home page, you can search their support resources, sign up for a live product webinar, or submit a ticket. The first time I attempted this, after a short delay I was served an error message, but it worked fine the next time I tried. One issue: visiting the support section's help navigates you away from your dashboard. To return, you have to retype the URL and log in again, which is annoying to say the least. It would make a lot more sense if the support center opened in a new window.

Good Solution for Small to Midsize Companies

Base CRM offers all of the basics for small sales teams looking to better track their customers and sales pipeline, including integrated email and voice communication. The company has greatly improved its reporting and third-party integration capabilities. But the largest organizations in need of even more integrations, deeper reporting and analytics, and more granular customization will still be better served with Editors' Choices Salesforce Sales Cloud Lightning Professional or Zoho CRM. Overall, Base CRM is easy to set up and use, and its no-hassle free trial means you can give it a test drive to see if it's right for your company.

Base CRM Specs

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Further Reading

• Zendesk's Adds Conversations to New Sales and Service Suites
• Business Choice Awards 2019: CRM
• Business Choice Awards 2018: CRM
• Business Choice Awards 2018: Email Marketing Services
• Fast Forward With Rishi Dave, CMO of Dun & Bradstreet