In this post, I will help you to know, compare and choose the best CRM for sports organizations. Whether you are the president of a club, the manager of a gym, the coordinator of a sports association, the director of a company in the sports industry or the secretary of a federation, I am sure that a CRM can help you, greatly part, to improve the management of your organization.

CRM systems are constantly evolving to encompass more and more key features for organizations and make managing sales, marketing, and customer success easier than ever.

But hey, let’s go in parts.

WHAT IS A CRM?

You may be wondering what exactly does “CRM” mean? Well, its acronym refers to “Customer Relationship Management”, which is “Customer Relationship Management” in Spanish.

A CRM will help you, mainly with commercial management, marketing and service to your athletes and partners.

The objective of these software is none other than to improve the service or relations with your “clients” or “potential clients”. Let’s call them that, although in many cases they will simply be athletes, partners, parents, fans or supporters.

With a CRM you will be able to collect and store in a database, the information of all these “customers” or “potential customers” and all the interactions you make with them.

For example, you can save a database of potential athletes who have been interested in the club, and automate a series of actions, such as sending an email, depending on how interested they are.

With a CRM you will have information in real time, and you will be able to make better decisions, even automatically.

WHY DO I NEED A CRM IN MY SPORTS ORGANIZATION?

To save the record of the database of members and / or athletes

A place where you can add and keep all your athletes, with all the information related to them, their parents, contact details … and information about the groups or teams to which they belong.

To send messages or promotions to clients or potential clients

Possibility of interacting with fans or interested people who have previously interacted with your organization, generating greater interest or conversions.

To increase the sales of products and services of our organization

Tickets, clothing, registration, campus, merchandising …

To offer added value to sponsors or organizations that support you

Sending information to partners, athletes or clients, and carrying out commercial or marketing actions.

To keep fans or partners engaged

Not for profit, but with the intention of maintaining and enhancing the brand image, generate content and communications for your followers.

WHAT SHOULD YOU LOOK AT TO CHOOSE A CRM?

To choose from the multitude of options on the market, normally, most clubs usually look at a series of requirements or functionalities, which will make you choose between one or the other.

Member or customer management

The CRM you choose must have an adaptable database with ease to find these contacts, group them and carry out joint actions focused on a segment of these members.

Tracking the sales process

It is important that the CRM allows you to create a sales funnel, and that you can move your contacts from one process to another without any problem. This will allow you to have a real vision of your sales process, find where you are losing the most customers and improve those processes.

Interactions with members

CRM should allow you to interact with members in different ways. Contact by email, form submission, chats, landing page, phone calls, meeting registration … There are several CRMs that allow these processes to be automatically recorded.

Statistics

To make the best decisions, it is essential to measure. The CRM has to give you that information in a simple way to interpret, with reports, analysis or graphs to have a summary of your relationships with customers at a glance.

Tutorials, support material and customer service

It is often an issue that is often neglected, but it is interesting to be sure that, if there are doubts both in the implementation, and later, there is a specialized team to assist you, or at least, resources prepared to solve all your doubts.

Automation

This really is not a “must have” for a new or small club. But it is true that, the more degree of automation it allows, the less time you will waste doing repetitive tasks that software could do for you. From sending communications to automatic responses or changes in the sales process of a potential client.

Integrations

Like automation, integrations are a “plus”. But in many cases, it is the crucial point to decide on one solution or another, for the mere fact that, on a day-to-day basis, a club uses several tools, and the possibility of working together with all of them is essential. Look that the CRM can connect with your ERP, your club management software, your accounting program or your website, for example. If it doesn’t allow it, at least look at the possibilities of using a tool like Zapier to connect your CRM with other tools.

Price

Last but not least, it is essential to know the price. Logically, as a club, you will have a maximum budget that you can allocate to a tool like this (higher or lower, depending on the case). While it is true that a CRM allows you to save a lot of time, and possibly increase your income, the investment that must be made is very important. I recommend that you do not stay alone with this last point, and value the quality / price ratio, to make the best decision and choose the best CRM for your sports organization.

WHAT ARE THE 8 BEST CRM FOR A SPORTS ORGANIZATION?

PLAYOFF

Member management program in the cloud focused 100% on sports organizations: clubs, academies, associations and federations. It streamlines and optimizes the management of the entire entity and saves up to 80% of the time dedicated to daily tasks.

Save time and money to dedicate yourself to giving the best service to members and athletes.

Main functionalities

• Members database
• Database of groups divided by teams or categories
• Compliance with the RGPD
• Tool for sending communications and metrics
• Communication via email and App
• Personalization of the platform adapting to the corporate image of the team
• Other functionalities beyond CRM: Online registration, payment management, activities, reservations …

Pricing plans

• Base Plan (€ 25 / month)
• Standard Plan (35 / month)
• Plus Plan (€ 45 / month)
• Plan Top (Custom)

Advantages

• Much more than a CRM. Comprehensive management tool at an adjusted price
• Helps to import customer data
• Demo and initial training at no cost
• Suggestion panel, where the most voted ones are implemented
• Very intuitive design, without the need to have technical knowledge to manage it
• Statistics

Disadvantages

• Only in Spanish and Catalan

PIPEDRIVE

Pipeline is a CRM focused on small business organizations. It has several advanced features, but ease of use is still one of its best features.

Pipedrive is powerful both in terms of customer relations and in the ability to assist in marketing and the entire sales process.

The ability to visualize the sales process from start to finish is especially interesting, improving efficiency and avoiding many doubts in teams, which are usually the main cause why CRM implementations fail.

Easily configurable and with a simple and pleasant user interface, Pipedrive is one of the best options for small and medium-sized sports organizations, as it has a small learning curve and amazing ease of use.

Main functionalities

• Multiple user access
• Chatbot and custom web forms
• Track calls, emails and contact history
• Automation and Artificial Intelligence
• Report generation
• Mobile app or web app, and the possibility of integrating with other tools
• Customer service 24 hours a day, 7 days a week
• Automation and Artificial Intelligence
• Report generation
• Mobile app or web app, and possibility of

Pricing plans

• Basic Plan (€ 15 / month)
• Advanced Plan € 29 / month)
• Professional Plan (€ 59 / month)
• Corporate Plan (€ 99 / month)

Discounts for hiring the annual plan

Advantages

• Offers an intuitive interface and agreement-based workflow
• Mobile app and synchronization of calls and emails
• Helps small organizations keep up with their customers

Disadvantages

• Features limited by the price plan you subscribe to
• New leads and old contacts are grouped into the same list

GETRESPONSE

GetResponse is a complete CRM. Provides newsletter hosting and publishing features, unlimited follow-up autoresponders, landing page, webinars, marketing automation, and CRM to deliver information to your contacts and turn them into loyal customers.

With a very complete control panel for monitoring from the browser, or the app for monitoring when you are out of the office, GetResponse offers a comprehensive experience for both the club and the athletes.

Main functionalities

• Unlimited emails
• Automatic message customization
• Smart Tracking Features
• +300 editable email templates
• A / B testing on emails, up to 5 different
• Guaranteed email delivery
• Integration with social networks
• Online surveys

Pricing plans

• Basic Plan (€ 13 / month)
• Plus Plan (€ 45 / month)
• Professional Plan (€ 89 / month)

Discounts of 14% for contracting the annual plan and 30% for the biannual plan

Advantages

• Email delivery up to 68% higher than competitors
• Powerful multi-lingual customer service, user guides, FAQs and tutorials
• Very competitive price and discounts for prepayment
• Webinar functionality
• Stats reliability

Disadvantages

• Lack of telephone support
• Improvable plug & play interfaces on landing pages

AGILECRM

CRM for clubs, gyms and small and medium businesses. Bring together the marketing, service, sales and engagement parts. The AgileCRM platform streamlines tasks, improves performance and productivity, and enhances collaboration and communication within the organization, since all people and information can be viewed centrally

Main functionalities

• Contact management
• Customer service
• Scheduling and tracking emails
• Project management
• Landing pages
• Automation of sales and marketing
• Social media marketing

Pricing plans

• Free Plan (€ 0 / month)
• Beginner Plan ($ 14.99 / month)
• Regular Plan ($ 49.99 / month)
• Business Plan ($ 79.99 / month)

Discounts of 20% for contracting the annual plan and 40% for the biannual plan

Advantages

• Drag and drop tools
• Drop-down tools
• Online calendar
• Integrations
• Nice and clear interface and easy to use
• Price

Disadvantages

• More help documents would help in some case
• The email creator needs a section to edit the HTML
• For marketing automation, you need to have certain notions

ACTIVECAMPAIGN

Activecampaign is used by more than 100,000 companies from all sectors in 170 countries. This CRM gives you access to hundreds of pre-built automations that combine email marketing, automation, CRM, and machine learning.

Allows you to segment and connect your customers through mail, chat, social networks, telephone and web. Marketing automation, CRM and machine learning for powerful orchestration, segmentation and personalization through social networks , email, messaging, chat and text.

It has more than 300 integrations and a design so that ease of use is one of its main characteristics. Another key point is a great support service available 24 hours a day.

Main functionalities

• Segmented and dynamic Email Marketing
• Marketing automation
• Measurement of engagement
• Automatic lead qualification
• Sales automation
• Lead scoring
• Statistics and probability calculations of closing sales
• Customer service and support

Pricing plans

• Lite Plan ($ 15 / month)
• Plus Plan ($ 70 / month)
• Professional Plan ($ 159 / month)
• Enterprise Plan ($ 279 / month)

Discounts of up to 40% for contracting the annual plan

Advantages

• Ease of use – pioneers in visual marketing automation
• Affordability – for less than € 10 / month for the basic annual plan
• Integrations – Allows integration with Zapier
• Testing – A / B test during all sequences
• Machine learning – Predictive delivery and predictive content

Disadvantages

• Less “pure” CRM functionalities compared to other solutions
• Reports – In some cases, too much information saturation

ZOHO

Zoho is one of the most popular CRMs on the market. Provides organizations with a complete customer relationship lifecycle management solution for managing sales, marketing, customer support and inventory management and services. All in a single business system and throughout the organization.

It’s affordable and covers all the bases, making it a great place to start your CRM journey. If your CRM and automation needs are relatively simple, Zoho CRM is a great platform to start with.

Main functionalities

• Sales
• Marketing
• Helpdesk
• Finance
• People and culture
• IT (Information Technology)
• Custom solutions
• Business Intelligence and Analytics
• Email and office
• Project management
• Collaboration

Pricing plans

• Standard Plan (€ 18 / month)
• Professional Plan (€ 30 / month)
• Business Plan (€ 45 / month)
• Ultimate Plan (€ 55 / month)

Discounts of 20% for contracting the annual plan

Advantages

• Good email marketing and automation features
• Integrates seamlessly with other Zoho products
• Form builder app available
• Full reports

Disadvantages

• Requires customization to start
• Limited customer support
• Forms are not optimized for conversions
• Zoho offers many features but the depth of its functionality is limited as its demands increase.

ONEPAGECRM

OnePageCRM is a simple and contact-centric CRM. Take a to-do list approach to managing leads where each contact has a next action to ensure they are always followed up. Capture leads from Gmail, Outlook, Twitter and Facebook and create contacts in OnePageCRM with just one click. Manage deals and monitor sales targets with this solution’s intuitive sales process. Integrate with all your favorite business applications. Support is available by phone, chat and email.

Main functionalities

• Contacts
• Mailing
• Automation
• Sales funnel
• Reports
• Mobile App
• Multiuser
• Integrations

Price plan

Discounts of 1 free month with the annual plan

Advantages

• Optimal design focused on details
• Customer service
• Good quality / price ratio
• Operations forecast
• Call / follow-up scheduling
• Mass actions

Disadvantages

• Difficulties in having an overview of the customer life cycle.
• It doesn’t have many integrations
• Doesn’t track campaigns or lead quality.

OCTOPUS

Octopus is the quintessential all-in-one LinkedIn CRM.

Helps simplify prospecting efforts and advance your sports organization grow.

Automate and simplify your work on LinkedIn in a super easy way, setting the automatic pilot for LinkedIn that automates your work and offers you a multitude of incredible functionalities.

Main functionalities

• Sending automated (custom) connection requests to 2nd and 3rd level connections
• Message to hundreds of first-level connections in bulk
• Automatically endorse up to 7 skills in the profiles of your contacts
• Visit hundreds of profiles automatically
• Automatic marketing funnel
• Statistics

Pricing plans

• Starter Plan ($ 9.99 / month)
• Pro Plan ($ 14.99 / month)
• Advanced Plan ($ 21.99 / month)
• Unlimited Plan ($ 39.99 / month)

Discounts of 35% for contracting the annual plan

Discounts of up to 40% for contracting the annual plan

Advantages

• Integrates well with various platforms
• Allows customization of the development process
• Easy to use because with a very simple and understandable interface.
• Different languages ​​as well as various operating systems.
• Extremely attentive support team

Disadvantages

• Sometimes the definition of automation processes is not clear enough
• Lack of useful reports and metrics for tracking and historical data
• Onboarding can be improved
• Only valid for Linkedin

Do you have questions about which CRM is best suited to your sports organization? Write a comment to help you out. In any case, in all of them you can register for free through the links that I have left you, so that you can try them and thus make a decision based on your experience.