The BEST CRMs for Accounting Firms, But They ALL Fall Short…

I just checked kaptura.com and realized that there are 1,681 client relationship management or CRM software tools listed. And that's on that website alone. With so many options, it's no surprise that picking can be extremely overwhelming, especially if you're not tech savvy. And I promise you, there's no one in the entire world that has had the time or energy to test them all. But I've helped at least a dozen companies with different requirements, select and implement their CRM. So if you're faced with that decision, I'm gonna walk you through how I think about CRM, how to classify them, what are the best CRM tools in my experience in each of those categories that I'll discuss in a bit, and the tools I'd suggest for you based on your individual skills and values. So for example, if you are tech savvy, or if you are frugal, or if you don't mind investing money on the highest quality tools, I'll have a different stack recommendation for you at the end of this video. So let's get to it. So we're gonna talk about 3 CRM categories and why all of them fall short. Okay. And this relates specifically to accounting firm owners and their process of picking a CRM. So I like to group CRMs in 3 categories, as you see here, leads, prospects, and clients or customers. So the first is CRMs that we use to segment, track, and communicate one-to-many with potential clients. So let's just call these leads. And an example that we have here is if you're sending newsletters with content, if you're sending text messages with offers, you're talking to people you already have access to and you are promoting your business either directly or indirectly. Then you have the prospects. And these are, in my opinion or in my definition, people that have raised their hand, people that have inquired. About your business. And these kind of like prospect or sales-focused CRM, if you want to call it that, are used typically to qualify, track, and follow up with people that have inquired about your business. An example of this might be the ability to do inbound or outbound calls, the ability to schedule appointments, and to also see your sales numbers in terms of how many close— what's your close rate if you have a sales team, what's the close rate of each particular sales rep, what are the different— what is the average deal size of the deals you close, etc., etc. Then we also have the third type of CRM, and this is a little controversial 'cause many people don't call this a CRM, but in my opinion, there's like the third type, which is to manage existing client projects, to deliver projects, to deliver those projects on budget and on time. So you have this other type of CRM that you typically use for your clients specifically. You might need to store a lot of different files, especially for things like tax prep and other accounting-related services. And you may also wanna create and assign tasks internally to the team so everyone knows what they need to do. Now, as I said, technically this third category is often referred to as task management platform or project management platform, not necessarily a CRM, but I found that these days there's overlap in the tools that people use. So a lot of people use certain CRMs for project management. Other people use some project management tools as their CRM. So there's some overlap. So bear with me, this is kind of the definition I'll use in this video. That said, I'll save you the time right now and tell you upfront, there's no software tool I've ever come across that does all 3 well. None, literally. And I've been doing this for 5 years. I've searched relentlessly for a tool that can do it all. But currently, as of this recording, it unfortunately doesn't exist. So don't look for it. There are companies that have billions of dollars in resources like Salesforce, ClickUp potentially too. And even them, I would not say they're good, all 3 that I just shared with you. So what I'm going to do is outline what I believe are the top choices in each category. And once I've covered them all, I'll reveal which tech stack I'd pick if I were making this decision for myself. So let's get to it, starting with the best CRM for leads in your accounting firm. The first one is going to be HubSpot. It's an extremely comprehensive tool that covers pretty much all fronts on, on marketing. So if you have some sort of— if you have a multi-channel marketing strategy where you're doing SEO, paid ads, social media, newsletters, potentially other things, like HubSpot can do it all relatively well, or very well, across all of those different channels. It's Very user-friendly interface and very easy to use that for. Probably one of the most friendly interfaces because it's very hard when you add a lot of features to still have a friendly interface. But HubSpot has done an incredible job at that. It also integrates with popular tools natively, or it even has what is a marketplace, which is you can see it as an app store, which in many cases, even if they don't have a native integration, you can find an app that allows you to integrate with HubSpot pretty seamlessly. That said, it has some limited customization options. Especially in the free version, you know, and this is a play, a game that SaaS companies play on you. They kind of lock certain features so you have to upgrade. And also the reporting capabilities are not very good if you're on the free version, and the paid plans can get very expensive if you want to upgrade later on. My second option I'm going to suggest is ActiveCampaign. In my opinion, I see it as like a budget-friendly HubSpot for small businesses that don't have omnichannel marketing. Because let's be real, if you're running a 10-people firm that's making a million to $2 million, like it's quite likely that maybe you get like referrals and you do referrals and content or referrals and paid ads. Like it's unlikely that you'll have an omnichannel marketing strategy. You may have just like 1 or 2 lead generation strategies in place. So when that's the case and you don't really need all those features that HubSpot has, ActiveCampaign is a very budget-friendly option that it's also easy, relatively easy to use. You can learn it quickly. It's not the most user-friendly in my opinion. It can— you can learn it relatively quickly. It's also affordable, as I mentioned. Mentioned, their marketing plans start at $30 a month as of this writing for less than 500 contacts. It goes from there, of course, but it's relatively inexpensive for what it allows you to do. Now, in terms of cost, you have fewer native integrations compared to other CRMs like HubSpot, and it doesn't have like the App Store that I talked about. But integration with Zapier, in most cases you can do any integrations you want with that. The recurring capabilities are not great at all. I'd say that's one of the things that has led me to not recommend ActiveCampaign to certain clients. And it also has relatively limited custom Moving forward with option number three is going to be GoHighLevel. It's also called some people call it Lead Connector. It has a bunch of other names. I'm going to explain why in a second. But overall, this is an extremely good platform if you're wanting to consolidate client communication. So if in your sales process or in your client management process, you use, for example, email, text messages, and calls, and you want to make sure you see everything in one single platform historically about that client, this is kind of like the one thing I think GoHighLevel does extremely well. It has many other tools, so it is kind of an all-in-one platform. But I'd argue that those other tools are not that great. They do the job. They have like forms, not that great. They have some social planners, not that great. They have some invoices, again, not that great, but they do the job. And I also like that pretty much everything is automatable, even if not natively. They have a very extensive set of automation tools and they are pretty affordable. I believe there's a plan that's, that's $97 a month and it has unlimited everything. So you can have unlimited contacts, unlimited emails, and that's honestly a value proposition that very few other CRMs allow you to have. Now, one thing I don't like is that I've been in the space to know that they actually have— they are like a white label solution that it's primarily marketed through affiliates. So what that means is that people get a very hefty commission by recommending this tool. And as such, I'd argue that's the one reason why it has grown in popularity in recent years. So sometimes I'm skeptical to recommending it or skeptical to really take people's opinions at face value when they're recommending it because it's like they're very incentivized to do that. In terms of it's a white label solution, as I mentioned, it has a lot of different names. Lead Connector, GoHighLevel. The fact that it's a white label solution means other people can use it and use a different brand name. So that's the reason why it has so many names. It can be hard to find support and help, honestly, for that reason, because you're sometimes confused. You don't know what exact name to— what exact name to type. So that makes it relatively challenging if you are not as tech savvy as tech savvy because you may struggle to find support and help on the internet. Also requires a bit of technical knowledge to sort through. It's not as intuitive as some of the options we talked about, like HubSpot or ActiveCampaign. Let's move on with the best CRM for sales or for prospects. When people go from a lead, just someone that you can spit with, to a prospect, someone that has raised their hand and is interested in working with you, uh, do you, uh, what tools are very good for that? The first one we're going to talk about is Pipedrive. It's an extremely simple tool to use, in my opinion. It's had one of the easiest interface interfaces and the features allow you to use it also for project management if that's what you're into, if you want. So primarily it's like a pipeline management software. So many people like to put up pipelines for specific projects or tax planning or for entity setup or for accounting. And you can create a task, what would be like a deal from a sales perspective, and you use that as a task to move the project forward. It has some very detailed out-of-the-box analytics and reporting capabilities that I found very helpful for clients when it comes to getting to know their sales numbers. So it's also something that I think it's one of its strengths. It's also relatively affordable. There are some limited, very limited marketing automation features. It's probably why I don't have them in the best CRM for leads or for marketing. And they recently introduced like campaigns where you can send emails, but honestly, they're just not there yet. Also, their built-in automations are very weak and limited. They do have Zapier support and a public API. So if you have some tech technical knowledge around that, you can be able to automate things you want. But if you don't, you're kind of like out of luck. Again, on the sales department, again, it has extremely comprehensive sales features. It has scheduling. So if you opt for it, you probably won't need things like Calendly. It can substitute and replace a lot of tools. So again, you have scheduling, pipeline management, you have quoting, you have invoicing, and a lot of other sales features that you might need. It integrates with popular sales tools. Again, sort of what I shared earlier, that it has its own apps at marketplace. And also it has plenty of amazing reporting options, including ways in which you can customize those because Pipedrive has a lot of great options, but they're not as customizable. HubSpot has both like great default options that you can see the numbers without having to edit anything. But in case you want to optimize and customize those reports further, further, you can do so pretty easily. Again, similar disadvantages, it can get very expensive very quickly and many of the features are blocked. So for example, I was about to recommend it for a client, but they wanted reporting was very important for them and the reporting features are part of the next plan that started like at $400 a month. And this was a very small firm where only the founder was making the sales at that point. So it didn't really make much sense for them. And the third sales CRM or CRM for prospects I'm going to talk about, it's Freshsales. And this is actually the tool I ended up recommending for that particular client precisely because it has analytics and reporting on their mid-tier plan, which I think is something between $50 to $70 a month. I can't recall correctly, but it's extremely customizable. So if reporting is something you want, if you want to see specifically the deals, how much they converted, they converted for different sources, it's a very good tool that you can customize reports as needed. In the automation department, they're also extremely good. You have as many integrations as you want, both built-in tools and also they have their own API and Zapier support on top of that. Also have great support even during the trial period. You're able to get on the phone with people if you have any questions and they include certain onboarding sessions, at least as of this recording. Once you sign up. One of the challenges I think with this particular tool is that it's a part of a much bigger ecosystem from Freshworks, which can make it confusing because now if you want certain marketing tools, there's another name for it, which is Freshmarketer. And even that Freshmarketer tool is targeted to e-commerce. So it's something that I find that alienates firms and service businesses in general. So it's something to keep in mind. More than likely, if you opt for this tool, you're probably likely only use it for sales and you'll have to combine it with other tools as I'll share in a bit. Okay, now let's talk about clients, which is probably where there are the most options and where I have— where there's the most debate around what's the best tool to use among the accounting firm industry. So the first one I'm going to talk about is ClickUp. And ClickUp is an extremely— have an extremely simple hierarchy that allows you to not only manage your client projects, but also manage internal projects. And that's something I think it's worth noting. It has like granular sharing permissions so that you can invite third-party providers. If you work with freelancers, it can allow your team to see only specifically what it is that they need to see. And you can even invite clients so they can see your progress and even assign tasks to them if needed. There's something you have to do, they need to do for you to progress with the project. Its automations are extremely flexible and its pricing is very friendly, both to start and as you scale. I think the lowest plan is like $5 or $7 a month per user. So even if you have a 10, 20 people team, like you'll only be paying a couple hundred dollars a month for a tool that will provide a lot more value than that. Also, a lot of people that are way smarter than me, to be honestly with you, that are you know project managers or process experts recommend this tool all the time. And those people are smarter than me, so maybe there's something to it. And you know there's evidence to support that there the tool is very good at what it does. I don't like that the is not very good at kind of centralizing a contact and their information. So if you use it for client management, I mean I use it for client management with a particular client in the accounting space, and they always have a challenge of. Okay, where do we store all the information? Because you could store it in a task, but if there are multiple tasks, you may have to replicate that throughout all the tasks. Unlike something like, for example, GoHighLevel, where you have all the information you need about the contact, you have all of the custom fields, all the information you need, and you have the history of all the communications you've had with that contact. That kind of functionality that it's sometimes very important with when it comes to client communication within a project is not really there at all. On ClickUp, so you may have to use something else if that's something— if you want to have that functionality. And honestly, despite being relatively user-friendly, it has a lot of features and I think it can be a steeper learning curve for some users that are not as tech savvy. Moving forward with TaxDome, this is another tool that one of my clients use. It provides features specifically designed for accounting firms, things like a client portal with secure chat and document exchanges. And it's often seen as not only a project management tool, but a practice management tool which means essentially it's much more targeted toward accounting firms and the needs that you have as a firm owner or an employee within an accounting firm. That said, it does lack some integrations capability, which is often why I've worked with clients that use it. But I typically, if I come across a client that doesn't have one yet, I'm probably unlikely to recommend it, at least because I'm biased towards integrations because that's what we do here at Opserv. And unfortunately, TaxDome has no API and their software integration is somewhat limited. I also find it relatively expensive when you compare to platforms that are not niche, meaning like things like ClickUp, right? It's like $5 to $9 a month versus this. I think it starts at $33 and can go all the way up to $50 a month. And again, my opinion for what it does, it's like it can be worth it, don't get me wrong, but I just see better options out there. There are a lot of other client CRMs. I've heard of Carbon, which is also relatively expensive, but I've heard great things about it. There's Canopy, Financial Sense. Even QuickBooks has like an online accountant software tool that supposedly is like a practice management software. But yeah, there's just a lot of other tools I've seen and heard good things about, but haven't analyzed extensively, to be perfectly honest with you. It's the accounting firms clients we work with that already have a solution in place and we just work with what they have. And worst case scenario, they have options they're considering, so we could come in and simply validate that the tool they want to adopt will fit their needs today and as they scale as well. All right. So as I promised, I'm going to make a recommendation based on 3 different characters and what I'd suggest on each. So just as a heads up, you'll probably still need a other tools like maybe for proposal and engagement letters, something like Practice Admission. You might still need something like Zapier or maybe a form tool like Typeform. But if you're a tech-savvy firm owner that can DIY and you're looking for like the best value at scale, like, uh, relatively tools that are relatively affordable, I can do pretty much anything you want. I recommend GoHighLevel plus ClickUp. Uh, this is a great option that will make sure you have everything, most of the things you need. But we will use GoHighLevel both for sales and marketing. You just click up for all your project management. The second option is the individual looking for the best of the best features, dedicated support, and ease of use at any cost, essentially. And here I would suggest HubSpot and something like Carbon or other dedicated practice management software. Here you make sure to have like tools that are specifically for you, for you as a firm owner. And you know, it's going to be more expensive, but it's going to— you also have dedicated support on both platforms in case there's something you need to figure it out. Last but not least, the firm owner looking for something in between: ease of use, some support, and good value. Here I'm going to recommend something like ActiveCampaign for marketing or leads, then Freshsales for prospects or sales, and TaxDome for clients. And although not ideal, I mean, think about it, you wouldn't expect one employee to be good at everything. So I think we have the mindset of seeking out specialists when we hire, but when it comes to tools, we sometimes expect that one tool will do it all. So realistically, you'll have to hire a different tool to do each job to get the most out of them. So if you want to better understand how automation can impact your bottom line, I encourage you to click on this video that will show on the screen right now to know more. And if you want to talk with technology strategists to help you choose the best CRM for your needs, head on to opter.co/accounting to book a free consultation or check the first link in the description. I, I thank you for your time. I'll see you on the next one.