You’ve always wanted to be sure that you always have an edge on the competition and maintain regular contact with all your customers. But you didn’t want to pay a monthly fee for a CRM system or hire someone to set up and maintain your database marketing software. Now you can do both with the best free sales and marketing software available.
If you’re a business professional looking for efficient ways to manage your sales and marketing, you’ve come to the right place. Our free CRM software helps you organize events, qualify leads, track e-newsletter signups, and more.
Zoho
Benefits:
Zoho CRM provides a small business-friendly platform with a simple user interface, customizable modules, pragmatic automation, and social media features.
If you’re seeking free-ness, their unpaid plan for up to three users is a good place to start. The platform will allow you to build up and define specific workflow, manage leads, and start rationalizing day-to-day operations. It integrates with Twitter, Google+, and Facebook too, so you can reach out to leads with superhuman perfect timing.
Once you outgrow the free CRM, you can upgrade to the reasonably priced Standard version of Zoho, which pumps up the usability factor with robust sales forecasting and KPI tracking. The Enterprise version piles on more features like stage-by-stage sales funnel tracking, data comparisons across users, teams, regions, products/services, and much more.
Drawbacks:
Zoho has no email tracking or individual lead notifications, which might be a problem if one-on-one, long-term engagement with specific users is integral to your business. UI can be a bit laggy. Paying for Zoho add-on modules to give the CRM more mileage can shoot up operational costs quickly.
The free version lacks mass emailing features and overall the CRM has pretty limited customizability.
Pricing:
- A free version is available for up to 3 users. 15-day free trial for paid versions.
- Standard edition is $14 per user/month, billed annually.
- Professional edition is $23 per user/month, billed annually.
- Enterprise edition is $40 per user/month, billed annually.
- Ultimate edition is $52 per user/month, billed annually. Exclusive 30-day free trial.
HubSpot CRM (Web, Mac, Windows, iOS, Android)
If you use multiple apps within your company and want a CRM to integrate with them, there’s no better choice than HubSpot CRM. The mammoth App Marketplace has over 900 integrations available to various levels of HubSpot plans (e.g., Marketing Hub) with CRM free users able to choose from over 800 apps in categories such as eCommerce, analytics, events, finance, project management, and customer success. Not only that, but many of these third-party apps provide free editions, which allows greater accessibility for small businesses with limited resources. And the new, included Operations Hub provides additional data sync features for a select group of apps.
The CRM is forever free and includes unlimited users and room for up to one million contacts. Included are deal tracking, landing pages, live chat/chatbot, basic email marketing, and a ticketing feature for tracking service requests. All of these are designed to provide a taste of their meatier Sales, Marketing, and Service Hubs, which provide advanced features at tiered pricing.
For many, the CRM will be all that’s needed to track deals and manage relationships, especially if you’re integrating with other business apps in your stack. For example, a good first step is to connect your Outlook 365 or Gmail account, so you can email directly from a contact record, track conversations, and use the sales templates to quickly respond.
HubSpot makes managing relationships easy with a contact record showing all sales, ticketing, and website activity with a timeline of pages viewed if the tracking code is installed. It will also show activity from your integrations. For instance, if you use Mailchimp for email campaigns, the contact record will show sends, opens, clicks, and bounces. Similarly, an Eventbrite integration will show an event registration in the contact’s timeline.
Connecting apps was straightforward for the handful I connected, but if you get stuck, each app’s integration page has a setup guide and resources to help. Also note that not all of the integration features will be available to free CRM users because they require features from the advanced paid plans.
HubSpot’s Operations Hub was released in April 2021 as a way to provide easier and cleaner data syncing between the CRM and third-party apps. Currently, there are over 50 apps available for this new syncing feature. As a test, I connected my Zoho free account from the list of “data sync built by HubSpot” apps in the Marketplace. With a few clicks, both apps were connected. Then I chose how my contacts were to sync using the rule option (there are dozens of filters) for only the contacts where I was the owner. The contact fields that are matched between the two apps defaulted to 16—to get custom field options, you need to upgrade to a paid plan. Finally, I clicked the review button for a summary of the sync and then clicked save and sync to start the process. Within about 20 seconds, all my contacts were shared bi-directionally between the two apps. So my HubSpot contacts synced with Zoho and vice versa. Any contacts I added or changes I made in either app immediately appeared in the other. Check out HubSpot’s Ultimate Guide to Operations Hub for more details.
HubSpot CRM Price: Free for unlimited users with free features from the Operations Hub included automatically; from $45/month/Hub if you add on the Marketing, Sales, or Service Hub. Operations Hub and CMS Hub plans start at $60/month and $23/month, respectively.
Insightly
Best free CRM for project management
SPECIFICATIONS
Number of users: 2Contact limit: 2,500Mobile app: Android, iOSSupport: Community forum onlyTODAY’S BEST DEALSVISIT SITE
REASONS TO BUY
+Integrated project management tools+User-friendly interface+250+ app integrations available
REASONS TO AVOID
-No live support options included with plans-Inbuilt telephony feature costs extra
Insightly is a CRM built for end-to-end project management—from prospect qualification through to winning deals and tracking projects. Its comprehensive feature set covers contact and opportunity management, sales pipeline and task assignment, project tracking, and bulk email marketing.
What makes this software exciting is its productivity focus. With its in-built calendar, task completion status, and customizable reports, Insightly offers both control and a bird’s eye view of the deals that need nurturing. For example, you can assign tasks and create calendar events to keep sales leads on top of the workflow, whilst using report filters to track success rates.
Custom fields can be created for contacts, which is useful if your target industry has unique identifiers—such as specific product teams in a retail company. You can also restrict access to contacts or deals to certain team members, but with only two people on the free plan, this has limited benefit. From this perspective, the free Insightly plan is best suited to owners of a small business or start-up.
Conclusion
This CRM solution is compatible with all types of industries, small and large businesses, and it comes with a set of useful integrated tools. It allows managing clients and potential leads in the right way with its automation tools, email clients and many more useful features to make sales go easier.