Maximizer has all the basics to help you track leads

10-second breakdown:

Quick setup and heavily integrated with Microsoft Office, Maximizer offers a reliable CRM software suite for diehard Windows users and smaller operations.

Maximizer is used in small (0-50 employees) and medium (51-1,000 employees) companies.

The good:

Maximizer does the basics very well, managing and marking opportunities with the leads in your marketing funnel. If you’re a sales-focused business and need a tool that can organize your reps, this could be the one for you.

Great integrations with Windows. A plus for PC users, but could be a deal breaker for Mac fans.

Highly customizable. You can update current columns and create as many new ones as you need to fully measure out your sales cycle.

The bad:

Limited reporting options can make it difficult to track your progress and monitor the health of your sales process.

There do seem to be some issues with the software unexplainably logging you out and even crashing, but support seems to react promptly.

How it works:

If your organization already uses Microsoft Outlook for email, you’re in for a treat. Maximizer’s user interface takes a few notes from Outlook, you’ll find your modules like Quotas, Calendar and Knowledge Base running down the left-hand side and the menu bar at the top has a few tabs for personal preferences – settings, help and social media.

Maximizer offers everything you expect from a CRM program, you can build profiles for all of your contacts and track every interaction they have with your business. In addition, Maximizer offers additional modules for sales and lead tracking, marketing and customer service.

The campaigns really stand apart from the crowd, there is a wizard that guides you through a few steps to set up your marketing campaigns. The wizard covers everything from budgets to adding activities to expected revenue and more. Maximizer includes a few templates you can use or you can build your own if many of your campaigns are similar. The campaigns can be synced up to your email as well, then you can send out mass mailings when and how you dictate.

There are tons of business intelligence tools you get right out of the box as well. Maximizer has a pretty intricate dashboard system that can customize to your liking including charts, tables and thermometers. Each of them can be exported out to excel if you want to make some new charts too. There is also a whopping 175+ reports bundled in for you to run, customize or export out to popular formats like PDF and Word. Reports can be set up to automatically get emailed out to certain individuals as well. For example, you can review yesterday’s sales numbers every morning while you wait for the Keurig to brew or send out the week’s captures to the head of sales every Friday afternoon.

Maximizer’s integration with the Microsoft Office Suite is top notch, one of the best in the industry rivaling even Microsoft’s own CRM. Outlook and Maximizer are synced together so you never need to copy and paste any data over, and you can open Word and Excel documents right inside the program. They also make it ridiculously easy to send out letters, with one click you can merge a profile with a letter template.

The mobile app Maximizer offer’s is also a few pay-grades ahead of the competition. It can do all the basics like viewing contacts or managing your to-do list, but where it really shines is the mobile reporting. You get a special mobile-optimized dashboard on your phone or tablet that can display any of the reports you love from the full application. All of the data is in real-time as well, so you can be sure you’re seeing accurate information.

There are a few downsides you want to keep in mind before you decide to commit to Maximizer, most notably the lack of social media tools. You can view LinkedIn profiles from within the program, but that’s it. If responding to user concerns through FaceBook or Twitter is a part of your company culture, you’re out of luck. In addition, there’s an unusual browser inconsistency with Google Chrome and Apple Safari, Maximizer can only really work on Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Choosing a package is way more clear cut than any other CRM programs out there. There’s one single option. The ‘Maximizer CRM’ plan will cost you $55 per user per month and you pay for it annually. One thing to note, Maximizer has an unusually long contract term, you’re required to sign for a minimum of two full years. They do offer a 15-day free trial though, so it’s highly recommended you give it a spin before committing to two full years of service.

While there’s only one plan, there are quite a few add-ons you can tack onto your package. Maximizer offers a few different training packages ranging from $399 up to $999 and set up packages that can assist you in importing your data, getting set up and more from $199 up to $999. Despite the fact there’s an order form, you can’t actually order online, Maximizer provides a phone number for you to reach out to their sales department.

Although it’s not listed on the website, Maximizer does offer a local version of the program if you want to host it on your own servers. Same as before though, if you’re interested in getting more details than you’re going to have to give them a call.

If you can stomach the two-year contact, Maximizer will reward your loyalty with a great CRM suite that comes packaged with powerful business intelligence tools and top of the industry Microsoft Office integrations.

For complete rankings of all CRM software, go here.

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