Top 15 Best CRM Software for Small Businesses

Top 15 Best CRM Software for Small Businesses

We’ve been hearing the call for some time now: The modern business isn’t just selling stuff, it’s providing experiences. Customer experience is the name of the game, and any startup, SMB or enterprise needs to put their resources behind those departments that are upfront and center in delighting their customers.

This is why cloud-based CRM is such a boon to the modern business. Cloud CRM systems take a whole bunch of technical, administrative and organizational work off the hands of a workforce, allowing works to instead excel at CX.

CRMs alone already save companies a lot of time by automating simple tasks. Cloud CRMs save even more time and money by doing away with the need to own specialized gear on-premises, and employ highly-skilled technicians to run it.

In short, cloud CRM solutions are a great way to cut down on weighty business processes so your company can really take off.

What should your SMB look for in a CRM software?

When you look at the scope of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Salesforce.com’s Lightning Platform, there’s no denying that such bigwigs of tech recognize the significance of cloud-based services to the 21st-century business model.

And yet, this isn’t just a competition among titans. SMBs, startups and solo entrepreneurs are all poised to make their business smoother, faster and more cost-effective by depending on the cloud. And in this regard, one SaaS stands out: CRM, or customer relationship management.

Cloud based CRMs should be a clear and preferred choice for both small businesses and huge enterprises. Why?

The cloud industry is booming, and only getting bigger. In terms of total market share it’s gone from $182.4 billion since 2020 to $249.8 billion this year and projected to hit $331.2 billion by 2022.

By 2020, just shortly after cloud-based services went mainstream, already 96% of organizations were using cloud-based services in one way or another, while a Gartner study shows 60% of businesses will be relying entirely on the cloud by 2022, double the figures from 2020.

Meanwhile, a McAfee report shows that 87% of businesses get an immediate boost to their bottom line once they’ve adopted cloud services.

What benefits do Cloud CRMs offer? Should you go free, open source or opt for a pricey premium package? And how do you pick the best CRM software? Check out our tips below.

Top CRM Software for Small Businesses

Alright, let’s get to it. Here are the top 15 Customer Relationship Management software for small businesses…

1. Salesmate CRM

With Salesmate Customer Relationship Management you can speed up the sales processes and offer customers a personalized experience.

Manage your contacts effectively and keep track of all related sales activities. This tool is also perfect for sending out email campaigns and you’ll know what happens to your emails once you hit send. As a Small Business you appreciate flexibility and scalability and Salesmate understands these needs.

Pricing: Starts at $12/user/month.

Website: www.salesmate.io

2. Zoho

Though we previously included Zoho in our enterprise-grade software list, this software can also be employed by small businesses – thanks to the variety in editions offered. Zoho – in comparison to Insightly – offers a bit more in terms of sales/marketing features.

It offers its users website visitor tracking, lead scoring, sales signals (with pop-up notifications about leads) and more. Note: Most of the advanced features are included only in the professional and enterprise editions.

Pricing: Free version, Standard ($12/month), Professional ($20/month), Enterprise ($35/month) and more.

Website: www.zoho.com

3. Hubspot

HubSpot offers a completely free version of its CRM software that is rather popular among small businesses.

The software includes all of the basic features provided by CRM software, allowing you keep track of your company’s activities, including contacts and company profiles, assigning & tracking deals, and managing all of that data in a detailed dashboard (visible to all team members).

Already a HubSpot Sales user? Then you can also use this CRM software to boost your inbound sales. Not to mention, HubSpot offers several integration options with popular apps like SalesForce, Shopify and Microsoft Dynamics.

Pricing: Free of costs.

Website: www.hubspot.com

4. Salesforce

SalesForce is perhaps one of the biggest and most widely used CRM software on the market. Luckily for smaller business, SalesForce offers a basic edition called Lightning Essentials.

This package provides the user with an advanced contact manager that includes email integration and follow-up reminders. It also includes a lot of options for integration and customisation.

Pricing: Lightning Essentials package ($25/month/user), Lightning Professional ($75/month/user), and more.

Website: www.salesforce.com

Salesforce features:

1. Task/ Activity Management: Follow and manage the different tasks of your teams, set new ones, and sync the data with your official calendar apps.
2. Contact and account manager: manage and access your contact information to gather essential data about your clients. This will help you improve the sales and marketing process by adding more personalization. You can also follow each customer’s actions allowing the sales team to overview each customer’s journey. The software can gather all the relevant data about each account in one place.
3. Customer Contract Management: Follow through on all your customers’ contracts. It allows you to manage negotiations, define terms, and set conditions. All the changes are documented instantly and agreed upon in one place.
4. Quote and Order Management: Easily make quotes for customers depending on pricing and product information. This can also help the sales reps process orders as all the required data is gathered in one place. They can also assign orders for each department to complete.
5. Email marketing: Email marketing is a crucial marketing strategy nowadays. Salesforce allows you to send emails in bulk to all your contact lists. It offers the ability to send customized content for your customers based on their previous interactions.
6. Campaign Management: Manage all your marketing campaigns broadcasted on different channels in one place. You will be able to make adjustments based on customer data and follow all the results and analytics.
7. Lead Management: Explore different options in the lead management chain and help reps guide the contacts through the buying process while tracking their progress on the way and finding the best message to take them to the next step.
8. Salesforce customer relationship management is a vital cornerstone in their service.

Pricing:

Salesforce CRM software offers multiple programs starting with a free trial and four other paid programs ranging between $25/user/month and $300/user/month.

Other add-on features are billed separately and can make the experience a bit pricey for beginners.

Salesforce Pros:

1. The most powerful CRM platform and software.
2. Edit features to meet your requirements.
3. Popular platforms make finding sales familiar with the software an easy job.

Salesforce Cons:

1. Not the cheapest option.
2. Helpful add-ons are paid for separately.
3. Setup is complex and takes time.
4. Interface packed with options making the simple tasks complex.
5. Customer support is a lot below the level of the service.

5. Agile CRM

Agile CRM is a particularly interesting CRM software in that it offers a lot of those big business features like custom appointments, drag-and-drop marketing automation and reports via email.

This software also supports widgets, a large library of plugins, API-powered integrations and more. The free version, however, is quite limited in terms of features offered.

Pricing: Free for up to 10 users, or choose the Starter package ($14.99/user/month).

Website: www.agilecrm.com

6. Freshsales

Freshsales is a CRM helpful platform that is concerned with increasing the productivity of your teams, especially the sales team. Its CRM software offers numerous tools that help in many tasks as automation of workflow, lead conversion, email management. Freshsales is a CRM that also provides a great variety of integrations concerning productivity, marketing campaign, and team interactions. Freshsales is one of the best crm for startups.

Freshsales software is a simple one and easy to use. The platform gives you the freedom to generate your contacts as demanded. However, when you have your contacts, it gives you all you need to make the leads into sales and retained customers. Freshsales is one of the best crm systems for small business and offers the best crm features. Some may say that Freshsales is the best free crm for small business.

Freshsales Features:

1.Leads and Contact Management.

Freshsales offers a simple and straightforward display of contacts. It shows a lot of helpful information concerning all the activities of the connection. It shows the client’s data from the company’s website, their posts from social media, and their messages. It will also show you how this client is worth for your company. All this data shown in one place helps with customer service and satisfaction.

2. Team Communication.

This is an excellent feature in Freshsales software. Its communication features will allow all the teams to communicate without leaving the software. The platform syncs with all primary email services as Gmail, syncing both incoming and outgoing messages. All emails are arranged automatically according to the clients for easy tracking. To make emailing more efficient, Freshsales offers email templates to make the process faster. You also can send bulk campaigns to any group of contacts saved in your database. The software will tell you who and when every email was opened in real-time notifications.

You can also add notes to each call log and save it to the contact who said it to be aware of what happened next time you call this client.

3. Interface and In Use.

Freshsales software interface is very user-friendly, which makes you like the software instantly. You will find all the phone, email, and contact tools at the top of the platform.

The platform design and menus will make you feel fulfilled and make your job easier.

4. Support.

Freshsales CRM gets a lot of support from the leading Freshworks company. You can call or email in any business hour from Monday to Friday, and they will follow with your request quickly. The platform also offers an extensive video library for any issue you face.

Pricing:

Freshsales have five different plans according to the size of your business. The first plan is entirely free and offers an unlimited number of contacts, integrated email access, and access to the mobile app. It is a handy free option for small businesses. The plans’ prices vary from $12 per user per month to $79 per user per month. Freshsales will offer the basic crm for small business and more.

Freshsales Pros:

1.Easy interface and mobile phone app.

2. Automatic call recorder and a built-in phone.
3. Double method email syncing and sending bulk emails.
4. Fressales is one of the best client management software compilers you may use.

Freshsales Cons:

1. Fragile lead generation methods.
2. Few integrations with project management software.

7. Capsule CRM

Capsule CRM is a software that’s been around for quite a while now. Starting up in 2008, it has become quite popular in recent years. It is a very easy-to-use software that allows its users to track both relationships and sales pipelines. Straight and to the point. Not to mention it can be used on both desktops and mobile.

The user interface is broken down into five groups: dashboard, people and organisations, sales pipeline, calendars and tasks and lastly, cases. One pitfall, however, is that it offers less functionality in terms of campaigns and reporting.

Pricing: They have both a free package (up to 2 users) and a Professional package (£12/user/month).

Website: www.capsulecrm.com

8. Microsoft Dynamics 365

If you are a Microsoft user you’ll probaly know that Microsoft Dynamics 365 is an all-in-one platform for sales and marketing. This CRM is more than your average CRM. AI
Of course this platform can be extended with other Microsoft products.

Pricing: Different modules and licensens offered. Sales Insight i.e. (€ 42,20/user/month)

Website: Dynamics.microsoft.com

9. Base CRM

Base is a CRM software that is ideal for companies looking to customise their sales pipelines. Users can make use of a sales tracking solution that lets you customise sales stages. You can add things like leads, collaborators and records to all your sales deals in the Sales Pipeline section.

Base also offers real-time visual reporting via templates as well as integrations with social networks and other third party apps such as Zapier, MailChimp, Yesware and more.

Pricing: Starting from $45/User/Month

Website: www.getbase.com

10. Streak

Streak is a great CRM software for Gmail enthusiasts. Technically a browser plugin, Streak is great for smaller teams as they can work directly out of their Gmail inbox.

This tool makes it very easy to track views, schedule emails, and send mass emails, as well as create separate email threads that cater to different teams (e.g. sales, HR, support, etc).

Pricing: From $49/user/month.

Website: www.streak.com

11. ConvergeHub

ConvergeHub is a cloud-based CRM software that is great for SMBs – especially considering the fact that these businesses don’t have to deal with multiple repositories, but rather one central platform.

Additionally, users can store contact lists and design campaigns as well as manage all sales activities. ConvergeHub includes built-in SalesForce automation and marketing automation modules too.

Pricing: Starts from $9/user/month (Starter package) up to $59/user/month (Premium package).

Website: www.convergehub.com

12. SugarCRM

This CRM has a great solution for small businesses, called Sugar Professional. The platform offers customer experience solutions, creating a simple and consistent experience.

Each user can customize and use this tool wherever and whenever. Sugar Shell helps you automate workflows and thanks to actionable intelligence you have the right intel for each customer interaction.

Pricing: Sugar Professional ( $40,- user/month, 10 user minimum)

Website: www.sugarcrm.com

13. vTiger CRM

vTiger is another all-in-one CRM software made for small businesses. This tool offers a great deal in terms of sales automation, email marketing and project / inventory management.

They also offer web-to-CRM forms to help users capture relevant contact info as well as prioritise that info. Plus, all features have been improved based on the feedback of their customer base.

Pricing: Depends on the package you select (Sales CRM, Help Desk or All-In-One), but pricing can range anywhere from free to $30/user/month.

Website: www.vtiger.com

14. Nimble

Nimble CRM is a great CRM software for those of you looking to combine contacts, email and social media interactions (works great with Twitter) in one place. The interface is also very easy to use in that it provides you with a to-do list, shows you top / key deals and more.

It’s also got this cool ‘rules engine’ that helps Nimble predict relevant contacts & activities based on your user behaviour. Users can set reminders to Stay in Touch with certain users as well as mark certain communications as important to stay ahead of the game.

Pricing: Ranges from $9/user/month to $19/user/month.

Website: www.nimble.com

15. SuiteCRM

SuiteCRM is an open source CRM software that, based on its tools and functionalities, is surprisingly equipped to serve even enterprise-level businesses.

This tool is completely customisable in that users can create their own business process models as well as create templated customer quotes, model sales pipelines, and set up automated actions. Note: some customisation options come with an extra fee.

Pricing: Not available

Website: www.suitecrm.com

1. Contact organisation

First and foremost are your contacts – hence the name CRM (or Customer Relationship Management). As your business’ customer base grows, you’ll want to have a system for organising that data in a way that works to your benefit.

This clean-cut overview of your contacts will also help you run sales processes more fluently.

2. Sales reporting

Helps you keep an overview of sales performance by way of various metrics such as calls made and deals booked. This is ideal for managing your pipeline.Small business Customer Relationship Management Software helps you track and visualize sales performance metrics through customer relationship profiles. These profiles help distinguish prospects at every stage of the funnel while building a pipeline and helping your client base grow with your business.

Tracking outreach and booking progress also help your organization better manage its revenue.

3. Customer segmentation

Digital marketers and sales teams are all about some customer segmentation these days.

This is not only useful for personalisation efforts, but also breaking down prospects into different groups such as how big the deal is, where they’re located, and more. This gives your sales team a bit more focus.

Chew on this…

Now that you know more about the options you have in terms of CRM software for small businesses, it’s time to start assessing.

Some things you may want to ‘chew on’ before you make your decision include implementation and the technical assistance required, user minimums, usability, costs and of course, with the new GDPR in place – security features.

Source: Work Wise

As we mentioned previously in this article, integration options are a particularly important factor in that you can combine your CRM software with all of the tools in your present toolkit rather than having to import data manually – which can cost you a lot of time and energy.

Mopinion Feedback Analytics software works with several CRM software providers including SalesForce, HubSpot and Marketo.

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