Which CRM to use with Intercom? This is what we realised
Last updated on June 13th, 2023
Who should read this? Anyone figuring out how to do account management and
sales on Intercom, especially if they’re trying out different CRM and sales
tools. Below we explain what we tried and failed with, what eventually
worked and what new alternatives there are to our solution.
Related: Yes, you can See the User's Screen from
Intercom
Also see: 9 Smart Hacks to Use With
Intercom
Contents
What our account manager
does.
What do we need that Intercom does not
do.
The tools we tried that didn't quite
work.
The simple solution we came up
with.
The alternatives you might want to
try.
Key activities of our SaaS account manager using Intercom
Account management, customer success and sales overlap for us because we have
a relatively small team.
Our aim is to qualify leads, make sure they really have a problem we can help
them with and if so, clearly communicate the value of the product.
After they trial and purchase, we want to further understand the problem
they’re fixing and explain key features they may not be using.
What do we need that Intercom does not do?
Upscope is
one click to see the user's screen from Intercom for onboarding your tough
and least technical users because it's instant and without downloads.
The normal process for customers is to sign up, install the software, do the 2
week free trial and purchase the product.
As the account management role in a small team overlaps with sales and
customer success, the account manager is responsible for contacting new
sign ups, understanding their problem, giving them a demo if need be and
following up during the trial and after the trial / purchase.
Key tasks include:
-
Check their status. Have they installed it? Is their trial ending soon? Has
their trial ended? Have they purchased? -
Call them at key moments after sign up, during the trial and after the
trial has ended. -
Document any problems and issues as well as the parts they really like.
Why we looked for a CRM to integrate with Intercom
Intercom is evolving from a chat and email onboarding tool towards a platform
but it’s not going to perfectly fit with everyone’s process.
It’s missing parts of a normal CRM / Task manager / Funnel system where we can
see where people are in the user journey and remind ourselves to contact them.
We began looking for that right mix of funnel system and notification tool
that also integrated with Intercom.
The tools we tried and why they did not work
Trello
One of Trello’s example boards showing you the ways that you can use it is as
a pipeline.
Yeah this seemed like a brilliant idea, and for a good two and a half months
we tried.
But spending hours of our day manually moving every lead through the funnel
made the morning commute seem like a rollercoaster ride.
It does let you link through to an Intercom chat but that’s about it.
SalesSeek
We really liked SalesSeek because of how it helps you
visualise the current state of accounts and maybe this is one we’ll come back
to in the future.
Their integration with Intercom was not quite what we needed because it still
left us work to do but damn it looks good.
We wanted to run conversations in just Intercom and we ran into a few data
transfer problems but that could well have been our misunderstanding.
Using Intercom itself as a notification system
We moved on to the idea of using Intercom’s live chat as a notification
system.
Whenever a user would sign up — ping! Whenever they’d install Upscope — ping!
When someone bought — ping! You get the idea.
Included in these pings were the company name, their owners, location, and
time — the important stuff.
But it turned out to be a pain because it meant that they were randomly
dispersed in between normal chats, so it got messy very quickly and managing
that wasn’t much easier than Trello.
Intercom is an amalgamation of features that amount to something similar a
CRM, and while we couldn’t actually function as a company without it, it
certainly lacks something that would have save my crumbling sanity.
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The solution for us was a simple task list
We found a solution that worked for us and it might work for you though we’ve
listed alternatives further down.
We built a simple task manager which took data from Intercom and links back
to the owner’s account in Intercom.
Crazy simple and yet it took us months to get to this point.
The list shows us where each user is in a list and enables us to contact them
and tick them off or snooze them.
This is a list of tasks to deal with
It shows the essential details and allows simple notes against each one with a
link to the Intercom chat of that user.
This is what shows when you open an individual task
It’s literally a checklist where we check their status, call them or snooze
them if they don’t answer and take notes within the task list or within a
separate feedback spreadsheet. It just works.
Don’t want to build your own? Try these alternatives we found
Our process might be simple enough for a task manager because the cost of our
product is relatively low and fixed.
If you’re doing full on sales then we came across these items in our research.
Close.io
We were considering this tool because the people behind it are very smart.
They’re a former sales outsourcing team that used their experience to build a
sales tool and so have experience in depth.
Below, a company describes how they integrated Intercom with
Close.io.
How to Integrate @Intercom Support Messages with Close.io
#CRM
Pipedrive
We don’t really know a great deal about it but a large number of viewers
within an Intercom webinar all shouted out Pipedrive when a funnel system
was mentioned.
It’s probably for companies with a higher customer lifetime value but it seems
very popular.
This is the Zap.
Create Pipedrive deals for new Intercom
users
Salesforce
I’ve had some experience with Salesforce in the past and I found it to be a
crazy interface and maybe too heavy duty for our needs.
We were also worried that the integration might not be as solid but then we
came across a post by Bedrock which is an integrations company and they
created their own integration for it to use internally. I’m guessing it’s
pretty good.
“Our sales reps live in Salesforce.com, and we found Intercom’s
Salesforce.com integration to be a little underwhelming, as the integration
wasn’t creating new leads and populating those leads with data in their
Salesforce fields.
This means that we wouldn’t report on this data in Salesforce, or create
custom views and assignment rules using data from Intercom at all. “
Intercom.io integrations: Sync your user data to your CRM and marketing
system
fields
Teamgate
Teamgate CRM has an integration with Intercom that allows users to create
lead, deal and contact cards in the CRM account directly from the live chat
window in Intercom.
Teamgate users have data, collected by customer service and support teams,
being automatically added to the communication history of each client.
See their Intercom integration page
here.
Todoist
We built a task manager for our own needs but maybe we should have tried the
Todoist zap if we had known about it.
Todoist + Intercom
integrations
Want to see a company’s entire set of Intercom onboarding emails used to
convert users into customers?
If you‘re part of the team that set up or edited onboarding emails for
Intercom then you know how long it takes to get it right. Would you like to
see all the emails another company sends out, including why they’re set up
like that and how successful they are? See the article below.
