GreenRope CRM Review

Advertised as the world’s first business operating system, GreenRope is a powerful, feature-rich software suite designed for small and medium sized businesses. It incorporates three different suites, sales, marketing, and operations, to offer an all-in-one business solution at an affordable price.

Unique Selling Proposition

GreenRope natively integrates advanced sales, marketing, and operational tools for businesses to save on the overall total cost of ownership. Instead of having to integrate three (or more) different systems together, GreenRope has them built into the software out of the box.

Moreover, businesses can gather and manipulate better data because all your efforts (customer service, project management, sales, marketing automation, and document signing) are tied to a single software suite for a complete 360-degree customer view.

About the Company

Based in Solana Beach, CA, GreenRope was founded by their CEO, Lars Helgeson. It started life as one of the very first email marketing solutions, CoolerEmail (still in existence) and has evolved into a powerful CRM solution since then.

Designed and developed by “strategists, developers, marketers, and technology specialists,” GreenRope claims to have been offering exceptional value to their customers for more than 18 years. They have more than 1,100 clients including the likes of insurance giant Pacific Life, LPL Financial, CSUSM, AMA, Hyperloop, SD Business Journal, and BBB.

Free Trial

A full-feature two week trial version is available for you to test drive GreenRope, once you have completed a demo.

Getting Started

Setting up the account and importing data was a breeze. Contacts can be imported from a variety of sources including a text file, CSV file, Yahoo!, Gmail, GoToMeeting, QuickBooks and more. We especially liked the CRM import, which lets you import other CRM data such as tasks and activities.

Little to no training is required to get acquainted with the user interface. The best thing about the whole software is that it is highly customizable and scalable to meet all your business needs. Once you move to the dashboard, you have the ability to customize virtually everything you see on the screen with a simple ‘drag and drop’ approach.

Who Is It for?

GreenRope is suitable for traditional B2C and B2B business models that are in the 5-50 employee range. It’s especially ideal for smaller businesses that rely on their sales team to strengthen the relationship with their customers.

Likewise, niche businesses that need a tailored marketing approach can benefit from GreenRope. It keeps track of every customer as well as their buying history and search behavior. With this info, GreenRope can help the marketing team target each customer in a highly individualistic way.

Who is it not for?

GreenRope is geared more for SMB size companies, rather than solopreneurs or small teams with a handful of employees. It could prove to be too feature-rich, somewhat expensive and overkill for them. Greenrope is also not geared for the enterprise market. Like most CRMs really, Greenrope ideally requires someone dedicated to champion the product to fully realize its capabilities as a very useful comprehensive business tool.

Pros of GreenRope CRM

• Comes with all the necessary features for sales, marketing, and operations
• Multi-channel communication with your customers
• Neat and customizable interface
• Can offer considerable savings on the cost of ownership in the long run
• Allows unlimited users, unlimited emails, for every pricing plan – something not very common in its competitors
• Very responsive and helpful customer support
• Intelligent lead scoring
• No contracts, as payment is month-to-month.

Cons of GreenRope CRM

• Can be a little pricey for solopreneurs/freelancers and smaller teams.
• An overabundance of features can be overwhelming for smaller teams that don’t need to use most of the features
• Mobile app (especially Android) has improved and matured over the years, yet isn’t as responsive as the web version at this point

Mobile Friendly, Cloud-Based

Any modern CRM needs to be mobile friendly and cloud-based so that it’s available anytime, everywhere. GreenRope has these bases covered. It has an app for both iPhone and Android platforms. It is a cloud-based program and supported on all browsers.

Here are some screenshots on Android and iPhone side by side, comparatively iPhone app seemed somewhat faster and more responsive. Their Android app has come a long way, and most of the bugs have been fixed.

Integrations

Out of the box integration is provided directly with 3-party apps like Authorize.net, Twilio, Olark, Evernote, BlueSnap, Panda Docs. Greenrope also integrates with Zapier for integration with a further stream of apps. They also have an API for more complex and specific integrations.

Cost-effective

GreenRope makes a bold claim when it comes to affordability. They claim that their software can save up to 80% total cost of ownership compared to their competitors while increasing revenue by 75% within 12 months. A survey conducted by VentureBeat seems to back their claim.

Feature List

Let’s have a quick look at some of the key features of GreenRope.

Dashboard and Expanded Dashboard

The dashboard has a modern look and offers a quick overview of where your business is standing at the moment. The dashboard is essentially divided into two sections to help you quickly find the information you need.

The basic dashboard is highly customizable and gives you a glimpse of your to-dos, business growth rate and other stats around it. You can add, remove or reorganize widgets to see the most valuable info. Moreover, widgets are interactive and clicking on any of these will open a detailed pop-up.

The expanded dashboard offers detailed information related to your website, its visitors, conversions, transactions, and more. You can also find details about new sign-ups and other CRM activities. Here’s a snapshot of the expanded dashboard showing how easy it is to get information about key performance indicators.

Contacts

The contact management module is simple yet very impressive. It gives a holistic view of your contacts which you can search or even filter based on different criteria such as custom tags, pending to do items, opportunities and more.

All the relevant information such as CRM activities groups social profiles notes etc. are beautifully organized on the same page, so you don’t have to switch back and forth between pages.

Not only does GreenRope offer quick access to your important contacts, but it also helps facilitate communication between you and your customers.

The company tab in the CRM enables you to add/edit company CRM activities.

Communicate

This is a powerful module that not only lets you create and optimize email campaigns and then track them, but also allows you to send SMS, MMS, and voice messages. Moreover, you can interact with your customers through social media, collaborate with your vendors, and third-party partners and even conduct surveys about your business to get a better picture of your recent marketing campaigns or promotions.

In other words, you can use the communication feature to interact with your hottest leads effectively and turn them into customers.

Automation

The GreenRope feature that really stood out for us is its marketing automation capabilities.

The CRM can do a lot of intelligent stuff on its own without requiring much human input. For example, you can define your customer’s complete journey – from initial contact to closing the sale. It is a step-by-step sequence of tasks that will get performed on a contact automatically, depending on the action they take.

Also, you can define workflows to automate more of your manual tasks. For example, if somebody signs up for your mailing list, they’ll get a follow-up email or may be added to a certain group automatically based on certain criteria. 

It’s impressive how you can automate all the tasks with a few mouse clicks and create extremely intelligent workflows, even if you are not computer savvy at all.

Calendar

The interactive calendar is not just another calendar that is thrown into the CRM. It is a very user-friendly and well-thought-out feature that gives you a monthly, weekly, and daily overview of your upcoming tasks and activities, as well as booking activities. You can also view a list of important events, which can be filtered based on locations. It can come in handy for local businesses and businesses that are highly geo-targeted.

Website

 The website builder is the only module that will have a slight learning curve.

 However, overall management, tracking, and analysis of your website are very easy – thanks to a single pane of glass monitoring. You can not only track the performance of your website but can also do A/B testing, create landing pages, blogs, organize events, run campaigns, offer promo codes and a lot more.

Apps

To give you full control of your online marketing campaign, GreenRope CRM provides you with a number of add-on apps. While you may not be using all of them, it is still a good idea to try some.

These include apps for accounting, brand monitoring, offering coupons, managing documents, creating user forums, managing projects and more. The Learning Management System (LMS) for client education/onboarding and employee training is a useful tool for automating an often resource-intensive, repetitive and tedious function. This Learning Management System puts the power of education into the hands of the user. With LMS they can easily create information rich courses with trackable exams, progress management, and marketing automation triggers.

Two apps that your customers will love are the ticketing system (so they can reach out to you for help) and wiki (where you can create a knowledge base and self-help articles).

Pricing Plans

For a business application with so many impressive features, the price seems very reasonable.

The standard account set up costs you $399, which includes three hours of dedicated training, a custom implementation guide, data analysis assistance, and access to all impressive features.

There are different plans available with the Starter Package costing $149/month. Even the starter package offers access to all features – the only limitation is that you can store 1000 contacts.

Conclusion

GreenRope is powerful CRM software geared towards small- and medium-sized businesses, looking for a single software solution to manage sales, marketing, and customer relations.

The software is quite flexible, and no matter whether you choose to use the sales suite, the marketing suite, or the operations suite, you will be able to customize it as per your needs.

It is easy to use for the beginner and offers a slew of features to satisfy users with advanced business needs. Depending on your business size, you may not have use for an impressive list of features, and possible unnecessary complications.

Take advantage of their two week free trial offer by requesting a personal demo to see how well suited Greenrope is for your business.