Bigin by Zoho CRM vs Dynamics 365: Which is a better fit?

Stephanie: Hi, I'm Stephanie and I'm from Elf Squad Inc. And The BIG Geelong CoWorking Day. And I give Bigin CRM a rating four out of five. Okay. Previously I was using a very large, well-known CRM system and I liked it, but when it came to configuring for custom fields and, really, making the system work for me and for our operation, it was just incredibly difficult. And I spent hours and hours on tutorials and going through all sorts of systems-based academy stuff to try and work out how to make this thing work, and I just never quite got there. And Bigin, I found, and on day one it was just working beautifully. Fantastic. I chose Bigin, mainly, I just saw an ad that popped up on YouTube and it was talking about toppings, and I thought, okay, that sounds great. And I have previously had some familiarity with Zoho CRM, and I was looking at perhaps going back to Zoho, but then Bigin popped up and I thought this could be quite good. It was actually originally for a client who is not as experienced in contact management systems, and I thought, we need something a little straightforward. So I thought, we'll just get him going on that. As soon as I did with him, I thought, wow, this is fantastic. It's just so easy. It just works. That was really my selection process. It was really just trialing it out for someone who had fairly basic requirements, but it was good to know that we had a fairly straightforward way of expanding. And then within hours of working on it for him, I realized this thing is fantastic. I'm going with this for myself. Getting Bigin started was great. It was so easy. It flowed. It integrates beautifully with both Google. So I use the free Gmail service actually as my email client, but I have a variety of different domain name emails because I am involved in quite a few things. And each and every time it's worked, it's not required a great deal of additional sitting down and doing tutorials or reading up on help documents or anything like that. It's been fairly straightforward. Yeah, it's been great. I've really enjoyed it. I do have a marketing and database marketing background, but I have from previous experience realized that doesn't always mean every system is easy to onboard, and this it just slotted in straight away. The only exception was just this week I just started doing mass emails and lead magnet kind of signup stuff, and there was a couple of things that I did need to look into because it wasn't as intuitive, but now I know how that works. Again, very, very simple and straightforward. It was resolved within about five minutes. I highly recommend Bigin CRM. At this point in time I haven't even needed to add in any additional plugins or, as they're called, toppings. So I haven't needed to explore that side of it. Everything that I need it for from the point of view of managing tasks, pipelines, email back and forward, mass emails, all sorts of things, it's just really fantastic. Very, very easy. There is a very well-known system that's popular amongst small business owners and globally well-known, and it's one that I've been very committed to over the years because I just thought one day it will work for me, and I never quite got there. So if you're just feeling like something just isn't working for you, just give Bigin a go because it is a breath of fresh air. It's really straightforward to get going. Even for people who don't have a lot of experience using contact management systems, you can add and adapt and customize fields for your contacts, your records, pretty much everything on the fly. So it doesn't mean you have to stop what you're doing, go in, change a field, and then come back out again. You can pretty much do it all as you're going, and that's fantastic. So for a nimble organization like ours, we really need to just get things done, not make it too complicated, but make sure that it's future-proof and can grow with us and I have every confidence that's what Bigin is. We're just under a month in and I am loving it.

Adoba: Hi everyone, my name is Adoba. I lead technical and product at Alphora, a team of roughly seven to nine. I rate Dynamics at a four out of five. So we use Dynamics most for sales and our marketing. The sales Microsoft relationship, sales is a big part of what we do. We also use the service part, which is the customer service. The marketing part of Microsoft Dynamics help us keep in touch with our customers and our sales reps with the product. So being in the Microsoft ecosystem is one of the best things with Dynamics. You have access to the entire product line that just works seamlessly together. Like I said, we do sales, CRM, marketing. All of those things are the individual products that we considered, but Microsoft was able to bring them together. The product for our sales, which we use the most, has really grown. The features that they've added has just been tremendous, and that's the best part about Microsoft Dynamics for us. I think there's always an issue with seat based billing, which is what we have with Dynamics today. I think that's just the biggest issue, and sometimes I think being part of the ecosystem of having access to Microsoft Dynamics to their products is an advantage but sometimes it can also be a disadvantage because, for us, we had everything siloed before in different other products but when we decided to use Dynamics we had to bring sales together into one product, bring marketing together into one product, bring our [inaudible 00:01:22] together into one product. That's sort of a disadvantage. I'm not sure how well these three things are able to work outside of each other if they're not connected under the same system so it was a huge consideration for us and I think for anyone who is wanting to use Dynamics.