Who is the CRM software leader according to user reviews?

Zoho has been ranked alongside Salesforce CRM, Nimble and Microsoft Dynamics as a CRM leader in G2 Crowd’s latest Spring 2015 rankings.

The Spring 2015 report is based on data from more than 2,500 reviews written by business and marketing professionals via G2 Crowd’s software platform, The Grid.

The report compiles reviews of 35 CRM vendors, dividing them into the categories of ‘leader’, ‘high performer’, ‘niche’ or ‘contender’, depending on their user rating.

Across all CRM systems, reviewers reported the product they use meets their requirements at an average rate of 81%, and on average reviewers said they were 80% likely to recommend the product they use.

Users also stated that CRM systems took an average 2.2 months to deploy, and that the average payback period in which users received a positive ROI was eight months.

Products appearing on the CRM Grid for the first time included Prophet CRM, Membrain, Relenta CRM, Really Simple Systems, GreenRope, Apptivo, vtiger, and Insightly – many of which were seen as high performers in the study.

However, alongside Nimble, Zoho is seen as a standout for its ranking beside goliaths Salesforce and Microsoft, thanks to the platform’s ability to connect information efficiently and intuitively.

The provider of software and cloud apps for small business is enjoying somewhat of a purple patch, recently reporting it now had over 13 million users, several hundred thousand business customers and revenues rising more than 50% year-on-year.

And while Zoho has been pitched as more of a rival to Google Apps due to the sheer array of cloud apps it provides, it is more than holding its own in the CRM market, with the company’s CEO, Sridhar Vembu recently telling Diginomica it was winning Salesforce customers to its rival CRM solution at a rate of “tens every day”.

In January, a Gartner report cited the CRM market as a key battleground for enterprise technology vendors in 2015, with forecasts stating the global CRM software market was worth around $23 billion in sales for 2014 and growing further through the course of this year.