Your small business is expanding, and so is your team. Your customers are flowing in, and the need of the hour is to manage existing customers as well as track leads. Time to bring into force a CRM platform that’ll make all business-related tasks a breeze. In this post, we have discussed some of the industry-leading CRM software for small businesses.
| Top Software Reviews | Rating | |
|---|---|---|
| 1.Salesforce Sales Cloud | ||
| 2.Hubspot CRM | ||
| 3.Insightly | ||
| 4.Zoho CRM | ||
| 5.Zendesk Sell | ||
| 6.Apptivo | ||
| 7.SAP CRM | ||
| 8.Freshsales CRM | ||
| 9.Pipedrive | ||
| 10.Bitrix24 | ||
You recently opened a fitness studio, where you have hired 10 fitness experts. Your studio creates exercise and diet regimes tailored to specific client needs. And, since you also aspire to scale up, you are also into generating new leads. Here you need a platform or software that is capable of managing all your administrative tasks such as tracking, generating, and managing leads, and assigning business-related tasks to the team. For example, you would want specific people to talk to customers and then specific team members to generate diet plans, etc. CRM software can help you do just that.
Before we dive into some of the best CRM for small businesses, let’s first understand a few basics.
What Is CRM?
A CRM software helps businesses of all sizes organize and manage leads and customers through one single platform. Here you can perform activities like tracking leads, watching sales trends, developing a database of customers, and also learning where customers are in their buying journey. The same tool also lets you manage team tasks in accordance with the campaigns you are running.
Why Do You Need A Good CRM Software for Small Businesses
Here are some reasons why good CRM software is essential for small businesses –
- Generate automated interactions with leads and customers based on where they are in their purchase journey.
- Streamline business activities across teams such as sales, marketing, accounts, etc.
- CRM software helps sync and share data across your team and helps provide better services to intended clients.
- Most CRM platforms these days bring in the goodness of AI and automation. Here you can automate daily tasks such as workflows, chatbot conversations, lead to representative assignments, etc.
- Set rules or criteria to automatically create workflows based on your business needs.
- Simplify customer interactions across a variety of communication channels – calls, live chat, social media engagement, and emails.
Best CRM Software for Small businesses
1. Salesforce Sales Cloud
Salesforce is undoubtedly one of the best CRM tools for small businesses. It is a cloud-based CRM or customer relationship management platform that enables small businesses to manage sales operations, customer data, marketing campaigns, and various other tasks from one platform. It helps enhance interactions with prospective leads and helps improve relationships as well.
Notable Features
- Hassle-free contact management.
- Easily track the stages of a particular deal for sales opportunities.
- AI tool “Einstein” uses data with workflows to automate repeatable business functions.
- Integrated powerful social tools to collaborate with teams.
- Design and automate workflows and approvals.
- Efficient quote management.
- Customizable dashboards and reports.
- Customer-centric automation that speaks to clients triggered by specific actions.
- Simplified collaboration.
- Less control over planned downtimes and CRM upgrades.
Pricing – Free trial available. Pricing starts at $24/ user/ month billed annually.
2. Hubspot CRM
As a good CRM software for small businesses, Hubspot CRM gives you a real-time view of your entire sales pipeline in a single dashboard. With it you can access detailed reports on productivity, sales activity, and individual performance of your team members. It lets you enjoy services such as storing up to 1000000 contacts and unlimited data.
Notable Features
- View marketing, sales, and service data in one dashboard.
- Visualize the entire sales cycle, thanks to pipeline management software.
- Add deals, assign tasks to the team, and track prospects from one place.
- Meeting scheduler.
- AI email writer.
- Track and analyze sales activity.
- Automatically populate contact records and get business insights that your team can use.
- Free email template builder.
- Live chat software.
- Re-login at times.
Pricing – Free trial available. Pricing starts at $20/ month
3. Insightly
Insightly is regarded as one of the best CRM tools for small businesses. It keeps all prospective and current customer data in one place. Using this data you can enhance and optimize your productivity. It works as a great tool for both sales teams as well as managers. While the sales teams can use data to increase business, the managers on the other hand can monitor their teams’ work.
Notable Features
- A/B and multivariate testing.
- Enhance customer experience with tools like SLA management, ticketing, knowledge management, and insights.
- Build, view, and convert sales pipelines.
- Keep track of projects overdue and milestones completed from the dashboard.
- Dynamic list segmentation that facilitates relevant content deliverance to customers.
- Easily centralize customer data to drive more sales.
- Connect to apps that you already use.
- Manage leads effectively.
- Create high-quality landing pages that convert visitors to leads.
- Lacks custom workflows.
Pricing – Free trial available. Pricing starts at $29/ user/ month
4. Zoho CRM
Zoho CRM is a good CRM for startups even with a small workforce. It is a cloud-based customer relationship management software with which you can manage all your business-related tasks like marketing, sales, and customer support with a single system. It can easily be customized to meet the specific needs of any business size and type.
Notable Features
- Capture and identify leads, and automate lead scoring.
- Get real-time insights about customers and functionality to connect with across various channels.
- Set up rules based on real-life sales processes.
- Automate workflows.
- Create personalized customer journeys.
- Track deals in real time.
- Build sales processes and ensure that sales reps follow them in every deal.
- Streamline the information review process.
- Connect with prospects and customers in real-time via email, telephony, customer portals, and social.
- Steep learning curve.
Pricing – Free trial available. Pricing starts at $40/ month
5. Zendesk Sell
If you are looking for a CRM for small businesses that also offer a free version, Zendesk Sell is an option you can consider. It helps with lead management wherein you can build data-driven teams and enhance team productivity around managing leads. The tool also helps you see the full context of where your prospective customers are in their purchase journey. It can also be regarded as one of the cheap CRM options for small businesses.
Notable Features
- Task Player helps you work uninterruptedly through routine sales activities.
- Myriad of sales engagement tools that make following up with leads easy.
- Manage leads, contacts, and account information to get customer context before meeting or call.
- Integrate Zendesk Sell and Support to float insights and data across support and sales teams.
- Accurate forecasting and pipeline analysis.
- Build trigger-based actions to ensure that all customers get your complete attention.
- You can cross-integrate apps in Zendesk Marketplace.
- Easily segment and filter leads and deals.
- Sync email with Sell and work with email templates, alerts, and automatic tracking.
- Limited pipelines.
Pricing – Free trial available. Pricing starts at $55/ month
6. Apptivo
Apptivo is a cloud-based CRM platform. It consists of a suite of integrated applications with which you can perform your marketing-related tasks, provide customer service, and manage contacts and sales, all from a single platform. It offers tailor-made plans for various business sizes based on the business requirements.
Notable Features
- Round-robin assignment of leads.
- Duplicate contact sorting.
- Automate workflow.
- Intelligent sales dashboard.
- Various custom quote templates.
- Comes with native Google form integration.
- Send personalized sequential emails to customers/ leads.
- API integration with webforms.
- You get user-level data security where you can restrict access to data based on roles and permissions.
- Errors sometimes surface while reporting.
Pricing – Free trial available. Pricing starts at $10/ month/ user
7. SAP CRM
It is a solution that is designed to help organizations revolutionize the way they handle customer interactions. With it, you can deliver personalized customer experiences, build relationships, increase sales, and optimize marketing and sales strategies. It also helps improve the efficiency of your team where you can use your resources more wisely.
Notable Features
- Contact import tool that links contacts to appropriate account records automatically.
- Functionality to merge duplicate contacts.
- Support for inbound and outbound triggers.
- Flag important customers by tenure using the Tenure Indicator.
- Using predefined assignment rules you can automatically assign case records.
- Get real-time up-sell and cross-sell recommendations.
- Filter data and limit reports to get desired information.
- A little complex. This may lead to client misinformation.
Pricing – Price on request
8. Freshsales CRM
Regardless of your business vertical, you can use the cloud-based Freshsales CRM to manage interactions with prospects and current customers. The platform helps you build strong pipelines. One of the best aspects of Freshsales CRM is that it comes with Freddy AI that helps segment and run smart sales campaigns with which you can generate more leads and increase the conversion rate.
Notable Features
- Create your own lifecycle stages based on your business process.
- Create custom fields – date pickers, text, checklists and formula fields.
- Send notifications to internal teams as soon as certain action is completed.
- Make calls from CRM with a single click.
- Efficient task management.
- Automate email, call, and SMS sequences and close deals faster.
- Contextual collaboration with Slack.
- Finding error logs may be difficult at times.
Pricing – Free trial available. Pricing starts at $15/user/month billed annually
9. Pipedrive
As can be inferred from the name, Pipedrive is a specialist when it comes to tracking sales pipelines. With this CRM software, you can manage leads and automate the entire sales process whilst putting all your focus on what matters the most, the sales. It is intelligent in a way that it helps refine your strategy based on real-time performance insights.
Notable Features
- Automate sales process from scheduling calls to email marketing.
- Add deals, win probability, and expected close date and track them by pipeline stages.
- Add custom fields to your reports to track variables.
- Access emails from within the platform.
- Tailor processes according to business needs.
- It comes with advanced security features with which you can protect your sensitive data.
- Create customized sales reports.
- Occasional lags.
Pricing – Free trial available. Pricing starts at $9.90/ user/ month, billed annually.
10. Bitrix24
Bitrix24 is one of the best CRM tools for small businesses. It is an all-in-one platform with which you can run your sales as well as manage your team. It is used by 12,000,000 organizations and is available in 18 languages. It can also be regarded as one of the best free CRMs for small businesses as it offers various CRM features free of cost.
Notable Features
- Add a client to deal every time you communicate with a client using “Quick Deal”.
- Connect contact center channels – Live Chat, CRM forms, calls, mail, etc.
- Inventory management right from the interface.
- Create campaigns, create a target audience, and track customer actions.
- You can easily create a hierarchy.
- Automate the document signing process.
- Prompt customer service.
- Occasional lags in interface.
Pricing – Free trial available. Pricing starts at $49/ organization/ month billed annually.
Unleash The Power of Best CRM Platform For Your Business
For small enterprises, integrating a CRM software is very essential. Tools like Salesforce, Hubspot CRM and Insightly can meticulously arrange customer data, recall preferences, and ensure no crucial detail eludes your attention. These tools operate as a finely tuned assistants, elevating customer satisfaction and maintaining operational efficiency. Needless to mention, that they are easy to setup and use.
Lastly, in the realm of small business, a CRM is indispensable—an instrument that not only orchestrates seamless operations but also provides a sense of personalized service, affirming the significance of each customer interaction.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q1. What is the Best CRM Software for Small Businesses?
Choosing the best CRM depends on your specific needs. Popular options include Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zoho CRM, each offering unique features and scalability for small businesses.
Q2. How to Identify Good CRM Software for Small Businesses?
Evaluate CRM software based on your business requirements, scalability, ease of use, and customer support. Look for features like contact management, automation, and analytics to ensure it aligns with your workflow and growth goals.
Q3. Are There Any Free CRM Options for Small Businesses?
Yes, several CRM options offer free plans for small businesses. HubSpot, Zoho CRM, and Bitrix24 provide basic features at no cost, allowing startups to explore and adapt CRM solutions without a financial commitment.
Q4. Where Can I Find Affordable (Cheap) CRM Solutions for Small Businesses?
Affordable CRM solutions can be found in providers like Insightly, Freshsales, and Hubspot CRM. They offer cost-effective plans with essential features, making them suitable for small businesses on a budget.
Q5. What Makes a CRM Suitable for Startups?
A startup-friendly CRM should be cost-effective, scalable, and easy to implement. Look for features like contact management, integration capabilities, and analytics to empower startups in building and nurturing customer relationships from the outset.
