There is no such thing as best, only what's best for you and your company. Sorry.
With that in mind, if you're looking to pick a CRM vendor, there's some major questions to keep in mind:
- What's your record volume like? Are you going to have 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, 1 million, 10 million, 100 million records of people? How do you need to store opportunities? Do you have structured data that you'd want to store? Do you have any CRM in place today, homegrown or off-the-shelf?
- Who, realistically, will own the CRM: IT? Sales? Marketing? Will you have someone whose position is that of "CRM Product Owner" or will it be part of someone else's responsibilities?
- What needs to integrate with your CRM? There's a lot more than just Marketo going on. What about your ERP? Any external sales tools? Anything homegrown?
- What's your budget? Some CRMs are cheap (heck, Sugar is technically free!) but are expensive to implement. Some CRMs are expensive but easy to implement. If you're looking to hire someone as a product owner, you'll likely pay more or have a harder time hiring someone with Dynamics or Sugar. This is to say nothing of Oracle or SAP on both those fronts.
- Are you in a specialized field? Certain areas such as financial services, healthcare, insurance and other regulated fields need some additional protections, processes and requirements; not all CRMs meet the bill.
Once you've really defined your business requirements, you can make a better decision. I will note that majority of Marketo clients do use Salesforce, since there's a lot of similar company sizes with similar needs between the two companies, so you'll see a lot of mentions of that. Likewise, Marketo themselves put the most emphasis and time on supporting Salesforce over other CRMs, but this isn't to say there's no support for others--just that it may be harder if you're starting from scratch.
Adchoices