Best CRM for B2B Sales Focused Company

We sell engineered products in Australia, most of our customers are return customers. So we want to manage our existing customer base as well as any new customers we manage to win over. I’m the type of sales person that has always knocked CRM systems. I’m hesitant to signup to any CRM package as I’ve had recent experiences with Hubspot and Pipedrive that confirmed my position on CRMs in that they create more work than what they are worth.

I read a post on here that many sales people that feel the way I feel, either have the wrong CRM package or it is not setup correctly for the sales team’s needs or that the sales team lack the required training. I’m willing to give it another shot as I really want it to work and can see the benefit but not at the expense of me and my sales team not contacting exisiting customers to get new enquiries or finding new customers with enquiries.

If anyone on here is willing to assist then I’m all ears.

EDIT

My issues with pipedrive and hubspot was that it felt overwhelming. It could simply be because I set it up myself and was learning via online tutorials. But I felt it required way too much interaction to remain up to date.

Our customers are predominantly maintenance people on mine sites.

Our sales process is as follows: We have identified most of the mine sites but we need to find out who the correct contacts are on these sites. It takes many cold phone calls to eventually get the right contact. Once we have the right contact it’s a matter of determining if they are interested in what we have to offer. This is often known after the very first phone call with the correct contact.

If they are not interested, we would circle back after 6-12 months to see if their situation has changed.

Often a customer is interested but it takes some time to get to point where they will send us enquiries. This could be due to prioritising other more time sensitive projects on site and we need to wait and touch base weekly/monthly to stay front of mind.

We would then get an enquiry where 90% of our products are already manufactured to suit standard equipment on site. So we don’t need to worry about manufacturing in our operation as a different department manages this process.

We would then quote the customer and potentially do a presentation in person or over teams for the product that we have selected. It may take weeks or months again before a decision is made.

We may then receive an order. We then want to continue following up with the customer as he is likely to purchase more of our products if the initial item lived up to the promises.

So as you can see there is a lot of following up and customer contact required. But I can’t be bothered to moving a deal from stage to stage. It’s too much. Where we drop the ball as a sales team is regularly following up on customers. Outlook calendar works well but I can’t see what my sales team is following up on. I have to physically remember to check in on every opportunity to see how it is progressing.

A step up from Outlook would be great. We don’t need all the features. I like the idea of call and email integration as it may make things less labour intensive to keep up to date.