Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring) vs MailerLite: Which is a better fit?

Josh A.: My name is Josh. I'm the founder and CMO, and I give SharpSpring a five out of five. If you want more reviews like this, you can click below. Prior to using SharpSpring. I was using a few different tools. I was using Pardot, Pipedrive, ActiveCampaign and MailChimp. The reason that I was looking to change solutions is because those solutions... Well, it depends on the solution. For Pardot, it wasn't really easy to use. It required more of a professional kind of Pardot expert, and we didn't always have one around. For Pipedrive, it was more of a CRM, so it wasn't really a fully functional marketing or sales automation software. It really just kind of kept track of your leads. With ActiveCampaign, I felt like their tool's on a good track, but not nearly as refined as what I later found with SharpSpring. Soon as I saw SharpSpring, I realized there was a lot more functionality and capability and that it was more refined than ActiveCampaign. And the last one that I would explain would be MailChimp, and MailChimp really worked well as a good email marketing tool, but it wasn't a holistic kind of complete marketing and sales automation tool. So those are the reasons, those are the tools that I use prior to SharpSpring. The reason I chose to use SharpSpring and [inaudible 00:01:21] SharpSpring is because it's so robust. I feel like the team at SharpSpring does a good job of continually adding new features, and plus, they have a very solid base, a good foundation of features already in place. It allows us to do both marketing and sales automation, all in one software, which is a huge convenience. I don't have to worry about connecting different pieces of software. For the most part, it all works together in one tool. And it's very affordable, knowing that you get all those different tools in one place as well. If there's a capability that it doesn't have, then it works really well with APR so you can, you can kind of make up a gap for anything that you don't find built-in to SharpSpring by default, which makes it just a very robust and powerful tool. Yeah. SharpSpring, as far as integration goes, was very easy to integrate and stand up. That part was really quick. I would say there's a little bit of a challenge in just being able to customize the software. And it's probably a challenge to customize and integrate software in general, when you're dealing with any sales and marketing automation tool; every company has very specific needs. I know quite a few companies that actually use SharpSpring, so I've been able to see this firsthand. But everyone has different needs and different capabilities, so getting it just right takes a lot of work and a lot of refinements. I think it's important for companies to know that from the start. What I will say is the SharpSpring does a really good job of giving you options and flexibility in their solution set so that you can make sure that everything gets set up to the way that you like. It just may take a little while to get there as you're figuring out exactly how to harness their tools and harness their setup options, to get it set up exactly how your organization wants. When someone is considering to look to integrate SharpSpring or to choose a similar like sales and marketing automation tool, there's a few things that I'd recommend. Foremost is, I would recommend creating a very clear set of use cases. For me, a use case is just how you're going to use the software, so if you can come up with all of the core reasons that you're going to be able to use the software and want to use a software, define those at the very beginning before you even start your search. So that makes your search a lot easier; if you're asking questions, you'll know what to ask. You'll know what are must haves, what are not. And then as you are getting sold on the software or going through the sales process, you can ask to make sure that all those things can be accomplished with the software and what type of time and cost to expect with a software. Now with SharpSpring, for the most part, everything is built into the same price. There's no major ad-ons, so that's a huge advantage, but in general, it's just nice to know what exactly it is that you really need in your software and for your solution before you get into the sales process.

Erin P.: Hi, my name is Erin. And I have a couple of companies, actually, but they're both small companies. And one is just, I'm a solo entrepreneur in the one, and the other is with a business partner. This is for MailerLite, and I would give it about a 3. I decided to move forward with MailerLite because previously, for another side of my business, we've been using Shopify, and that has a larger price tag to it. So we decided to use MailerLite because we thought that it had a great price. And it was a new business venture and we wanted to kind of try it out. We thought it would be really easy. And that was why we ended up trying MailerLite. We decided on MailerLite because the price, they had a great sale that was going on. They also had a lot of all-inclusive items that some other programs didn't have. So they had the web builder, they had the ability to be handling mailing lists, they had the ability to be doing landing pages. So it seemed like a really good package and a good deal. And for the price, it seemed like a great way to be starting this new venture that we had. In the beginning, it kind of started off to a bit of a rocky start, unfortunately. We had a bit of trouble just even getting some basic questions answered. Until you level up to one of their higher packages, they actually don't offer any kind of real customer service, which we didn't realize in the beginning. And when we hit a couple of roadblocks, we had to go through a really lengthy process to even just try to get some customer service back. So that wasn't a great way to start. So, once we got started up and running, the main focus initially was to actually get a website up. And the website was where we actually were running into all the problems. The other side was for the mailing list, and that actually went really well. So we had no problems creating mailing lists, being able to send everything out, to be sending auto-mailings. That all was great with MailerLite and actually stays. We still use them for that. And I do believe that maybe that they actually started as that was what their company started doing. So I think that the other portion, which is why we also had joined, was because of the website. I think that that maybe was an add-on later, and I don't think that that is their core functionality, and that is where we were having the issues. Unfortunately, on creating the website, it became very glitchy. It was really difficult to actually get in and build things. It wouldn't stay. So that side is something I just, unfortunately, would not recommend. I would steer clear and I would find a different way to go. But the mailing part of it, the actual email functionality, they've been fabulous. So I would recommend it on that side. So, that's it.