Zendesk Sell Review 2023 (Features, Pricing, Pros & Cons)

Sherlock Holmes has Dr. John Watson. Batman has Robin. Frodo has Samwise Gamgee. 

Sales teams have Zendesk Sell. 

Like every movie sidekick that acts as the main support to the hero/heroine, Zendesk Sell helps sales teams win over more customers and close more deals. 

It's the sidekick everyone wants. It's resourceful and bright, loyal to a fault, and capable of encouraging the protagonist to become an improved version of themselves.

So, in this Zendesk Sell review, we'll explain all the most notable characteristics that make the sales CRM the best sidekick in history. 

We'll also look at its pricing plans to see if they're acceptable and check what real-life customers say about the product. 

Buckle up, and let's jump right into it! 

Zendesk Sell review 2023: Is Zendesk Sell any good?

When Zendesk asked their customers to share their experiences with Sell, they reported:

• 15% increase in overall growth rate

• 91% spend less time logging emails

• 84% increase in accurate reporting

• 20% increase in sales productivity

A Customer Relationship Management tool (CRM) like Zendesk Sell, formerly Base CRM, can be a legit choice for any business of any company size, especially for small to midsize businesses (SMBs) that want an easier way to see how their sales reps are doing. 

Luckily, Sell shows all the essential metrics that managers should be aware of, such as total sales, average deal size, number of deals won, pipeline conversion rates, and more.

Sell can be the best CRM platform for teams who are tired of managing leads and finding their way around in a messy Google spreadsheet. The CRM software lets you create pipelines and move customers from one stage to another as needed. 

And if you're looking for a tool that integrates with other sales tools that help you work faster and more efficiently, Sell has that, too. The Google Calendar integration, for example, lets you create new Zendesk tickets when Google Calendar events start. Or, with the Slack integration, you can quickly post new Zendesk tickets to Slack.

The CRM scores highly on affordability, as well. There are four different pricing plans with a different set of features that can accommodate any business no matter its size, from three-people startups to people-heavy enterprises spread across multiple continents. Our Zendesk review will show you all the capabilities of this amazing tool!

Zendesk Sell pricing plans 

First of all, how much does Zendesk Sell cost? Let’s take at Zendesk Sell prices:

Zendesk Sell features list

The main features of Zendesk Sell are:

• Account management

• Email 

• Voice and text 

• Tasks and activity tracking

• Integrations and APIs

• Sales tracking

• Reporting

• Mobile app

Account management

Together with leads and deals, contacts are one of the primary elements in your Zendesk Sell account. Meaning, adding contacts will be a daily task. 

Sell makes it incredibly easy to create a new profile for a person or a company. Adding a contact means creating a new profile for a person or company. Instead of manually entering tons of contact information, you can type in the email address of your new contact, and Sell will begin to look at a database of 33 million contacts and try to identify who you're trying to add to the system. 

Apart from that, you can also import contacts into Sell from other sources such as a CSV file, Linkedin, Google, Salesforce, and Highrise. 

Another good-to-have feature is Duplicate Detection. What this feature does is it checks to see if the contact you're adding has already been added into the system. Convenient, right? 

Email

Zendesk Sell is an ideal choice for sales teams for whom a rich set of email features means a great deal.

To start with, you can set up an unlimited number of email templates that are accessible to all Sell users on your account.

You don't even have to send your emails one by one. The system lets you send personalized bulk emails using those custom-made templates to accelerate your outreach and reach more prospects and customers. Before you ask, the answer is no: the recipients of a bulk email message won't know that the message has been sent to other recipients.

Once the emails are sent, you can easily track in real-time how many times your emails get opened or whether people clicked on any links inside the email. You'll even get a notification as soon as someone opens their email. 

Better still, customers in the Enterprise and Elite paid plans have access to the Email Sentiment Analysis feature that analyzes linguistic patterns in your emails to identify and alert you of deals that are at risk. 

Voice and text

With the activation of Sell Voice, Sell's native dialer, you'll be able to make and receive calls and text messages from within the system.

Sell Voice is available on all plans, and every account comes with complimentary call credit.

You can call via browser or a mobile transfer number. Once on a call, you can use controls such as call recording, muting and unmuting the microphone, making notes, and using calling scripts (Call scripts are available on Enterprise and Elite plans). 

Answering inbound calls is also possible with the Sell Voice feature. If someone calls your Voice phone number while you're using Sell, you'll be notified in your Sell window. In case you don't pick up or your computer is off, the call can be forwarded to a transfer number you provide during setup. 

If you're using the Enterprise or the Elite plan, you can create an automatically dialed call list to dial the numbers of selected leads and contacts quickly.

In addition to the voice feature, the text messaging feature uses your existing Voice number. You can send a text message and respond to a text message directly from the contact or lead page.

The great news is that the voice and text features are available both on desktop and the mobile app. Also, all the calls and text messages to contacts are recorded and saved for future reference.

Tasks and activity tracking

Project management on the software is a piece of cake. You can easily add and manage tasks from the Tasks page or directly from the lead, contact, and deal cards. 

Tasks can carry a due date and time so that nothing falls through the cracks. Additionally, tasks can be updated, deleted, or marked as complete. 

The Enterprise and Elite plans let users create and use automated task actions for a more streamlined workflow. For example, you can automatically create a standard workflow task for Sell users whenever a new lead, contact, or deal is added.

A calendar with appointment and task management is a critical part of Sell. Let's say that you're adding a new lead and want to create an appointment for your first phone meeting. You can do so on the lead, contact, or deal card, or directly in the Calendar or Tasks pages. 

Best of all, you can choose to use the calendar provided by Sell or integrate Sell with external Google or Exchange calendars.

Integrations and APIs

Users of all four plans can connect Zendesk Sell to Zendesk Support and get two great solutions covering the entire customer experience. This symbiosis between the two platforms comes with benefits for both the support and sales team.

For example, support agents can get more context from the sales process, while the sales team can get quickly and easily notified by the support agents every time an opportunity appears in their support discussions. 

Another great news is that you can connect Zendesk Sell with all the other tools you love to use through Zapier.

There are 2,000+ apps that you can connect to your Zendesk Sell account in the form of Zaps without writing a single line of code, including Mailchimp, Slack, Shopify, Asana, HubSpot, Webflow, PandaDoc, and more.

With the Mailchimp integration, you can send email newsletters, manage subscribers, and sync your email marketing with your social media network platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Let's say that you're working on a side project or building a major integration. In that case, Zendesk Sell lets you use the platform's API to set your integration project up for success. The Core Sell API is included in the Professional, Enterprise, and Elite plan. The Firehose, Sync, and Search APIs are available with the Elite plan.

And if you want to extend the functionality of Zendesk Sell, that's possible too. The system lets you build a private app with the Zendesk App framework and upload it to the platform so that your sales reps can start using it.

Sales tracking

As every business has a unique sales process, you can easily customize your pipeline stages to best fit your sales cycle. 

It's worth knowing that the platform also lets you organize and view your data in multiple ways through filtering options such as Custom Data Fields, Filters, and Tags.

For example, if there's a contact that's more important than other contacts, you can add a tag such as "premium" to their profile. You can then use this tag as a filter option to quickly view all the contacts that contain that tag. Similarly, you can use Custom Fields to store variable data such as contact numbers and any other additional information you want to add to a contact.

Sales features like the Lead and Deal Scoring help sales reps determine which leads and deals deserve their time and focus. 

Sell also offers some amazing advanced features that are available to the Enterprise and Elite plan users such as the Companies Hierarchy and the Product Catalog features. 

With the Companies Hierarchy feature, you can create a hierarchy of company subsidiaries and divisions. In other words, you can build a tree to define parent/child company relationships. 

The Product Catalog feature lets you define goods for use with your deals. For example, let's say that you want to add one of your products, which is Organic Vanilla ice cream. Once your product is added to the system, you can then add it to a deal. Now you'll be able to see the total product value, as well as any discount you've applied to the product's value.

Reporting

Sell provides several options for analyzing your sales pipeline and performance. 

Every Sell plan offers all the essential reports such as funnel analysis, stage distribution, total sales, sales by customer, deal loss reasons, total incoming deals, etc.

The Professional, Enterprise, and Elite plans come with additional reporting options that include sales forecasting and goals tracking. The activity reports such as call and email outcomes are only available with the Enterprise and Elite plans.

The advanced reports, including the stage duration analysis, loss reasons by owner, and the stage conversion by owner, are reserved for the Elite plan users. 

Mobile app

All the features you would find in the desktop version of the CRM are also available on Sell's mobile app. Even if you're on the go with no internet access, you'll be glad to hear that the mobile app supports offline access. 

Better still, the Geolocation feature lets you use your mobile to view your leads, contacts, and deals on a map and get to them with one-touch driving directions. 

Sales reps who often spend their days going door to door or making visits to their clients will greatly appreciate the Visit Tracking and GeoVerification feature. They can easily log visit outcomes with this feature, verify their visits using geoverification, and get visit reports. 

Zendesk Sell pros and cons

Here are the advantages and disadvantages of Zendesk Sell:

Zendesk Sell advantages

• Lead scoring and lead management.

• Pipeline management and pipeline visibility. 

• Great pricing options.

• Suitable for small to midsize businesses. 

• Integration with Zendesk support for an end-to-end customer experience.

• Email integration (Gmail, Office 365). 

• Zapier integration. 

• User-friendly iOS- and Android-compatible mobile app.

• Fast and easy-to-learn.

• Great for businesses that may or may not have a fully formed IT team.

• Powerful sales insights and analytics. 

• A built-in telephone system.

• Single Sign On (SSO) available across all Sell plans. 

• A free 14-day trial. 

Zendesk Sell disadvantages

• There's a bit of a learning curve.

• It can get pricey if you want to use the more advanced features.

• No built-in marketing automation tool. 

• It can be difficult to contact customer support.

Is Zendesk Sell worth it? Our conclusion

Zendesk Sell indeed sounds like a CRM software that can get your sales team on the right track. And there are plenty of benefits for being on the right track. 

For one, companies with a clearly defined sales process in place can earn 28% percent more revenue than competitors who don’t have one. 

What's more, sales reps spend so much time getting organized and trying to make sense of messy spreadsheets that one study showed 63% of sales reps’ time is spent on tasks other than selling.

These statistics only confirm what's apparent: a streamlined sales process helps sales reps better understand their customers' journeys and keeps the entire team focused and aligned with common goals. 

Zendesk Sell can be a good CRM pick for small and medium-sized companies that want a clean and simple yet powerfully effective CRM tool. 

Overall, it's intuitive, extremely user-friendly, and comes with all the features your sales team would need to perform well. 

Better still, it's fairly affordable and comes with four different pricing plans that appeal to different budgets. If you're on a tight budget, this may be a good pick. 

Not to mention that the software works perfectly for sales reps who're often on the go as the mobile app is superb. 

Every aspect of the sales process seems well-thought-of by the company that designed this CRM. You can send up to 300 emails in bulk, make and receive calls and text messages from within the system, and customize your pipeline stages to best fit your sales cycle, among other features. 

One particular feature seems to stand out in customer reviews, and that's the tight integration between Zendesk Sell and Zendesk Support. With the integration, sales teams get two great solutions that cover the entire customer experience. Check out the help desk software review for more info on support. 

So, is it worth it? 

The bottom line is that if you're a small business on a budget with up to 3 users, for $700 per year, Zendesk Sell doesn't sound so bad. Even if you're a large enterprise and need a range of powerful features to manage your massive list of contacts, Sell can accommodate your needs, too, with its Elite monthly plan. 

The ball is in your court now. Will you serve or return the ball?