Close vs Zoho SalesIQ: Which is a better fit?

Todd Q.: Hi, my name is Todd and I'm an owner. I would give Close.com a rating of five. For more reviews, please click below. Prior to using Close, we were using HubSpot. The reason we switched up HubSpot is it's a little more complex to get started. There are also a lot of other packages you had to buy to make it worthwhile. So I think we ended up switching because we wanted to get started with something more quickly and not have to have such a large capital outlay to get started. We chose Close because it's a lot faster to get started with than some of the other products we had tried. It was very easy to get productive very quickly. It was easy to start simply. Then as our business needs changed or grew, Close was able to grow with us. It was easy to have more advanced searches, more advanced ways of slicing and dicing the data that we needed to find. So it just helped us get started quickly and maintain our growth moving forward. Getting started with Close was very easy. It didn't require a lot of set up, so it was very quick for us to get up and running and get productive with it quickly. I think that's a big reason why we initially went with it because it didn't require all that time and effort setting it up. It was quick to start helping us without having to spend a lot of time on it. Don't feel the need to create lots of different types of opportunities or lead statuses, that kind of thing. Just get started and as simple as you can. Then as your needs or complexities grow, only then start worrying about classifying all your leads and information into all these different buckets because I think once you use it for a while, you'll start understanding the need for those different kinds of classifications. Just don't do it too soon.

Daniel: Hey, I'm Daniel. I'm a Product Marketing Manager in the SAS industry, and I give Zoho SalesIQ a three out of five. We use Zoho SalesIQ to engage with the visitors on our website. Simply put, that means people being able to chat in, get responses, able to get support if they need to, or ask pre-sales questions. And also, something that's pretty cool is being able to proactively engage with people based on a set of rules. For example, someone's come to the website for the second time. We may want to give a little pop up and say, "Hey, welcome back. Any questions this time around?" Or, "Is there anything that caught your interest?" Something along those lines. What I really like about SalesIQ is its simplicity. For most the basic functions that you need, it's really simple, really easy to use, and you can basically just log on and let it go. You get a little notification when there's a chat, and you can respond to it, and then, boom, close it, get back to your work. For most the basic stuff that you need, it's really simple, fast, easy chat tool. What I don't like about Zoho SalesIQ is that I found it to be not as robust as some of the dedicated chat tools, meaning there could be some other ones out there that only focus on chat, and they have options where you can set hierarchies with bots, for example, really easily, but just drag and drop where it says, "Hey, ask this person this." They respond one of these things, ask another thing. Just very easy, user-friendly ways to segment people and push them into a different box or different responses based on just a couple of easy factors. And with SalesIQ, they have something called Zobot, and that requires some kind of coding in their specific language. And basically, just took a lot longer and a lot more brain power to try to wrap one's mind around than just simply dragging and dropping, what you see is what you get, type editor to create a chat bot. There's also a couple of little bugs that can be really annoying. If you are chatting with someone and you get a second chat coming in, it will automatically take you out of that chat and put you into the next one. So, imagine not looking at the screen for a second, and you're typing, "Yes, happy to help you out with that. The refund is coming soon." And it has, in the meantime, you didn't notice, let's say, the sound, it switched you over. You wrote, "The refund is coming soon," hit Enter, and then, now, that new chat person sees, "The refund is coming soon," which is a little awkward. Obviously, you can work around that, but there's just a few little things like that that make you think that this isn't as streamlined as it could be.