Times have changed, and you can’t just rely on a simple excel sheet when you should be using the best contact management software for small business to get ahead. Contact management software is like an interactive database that will make it easier to manage your contacts.
Need the best contact management software for small business? There are many contact management systems these days. Need to manage contacts? I’m sure you do. For business and other activities, you need to know who your partners are and how to get in touch with them. That’s why, as a marketer and business owner, you absolutely need a good contact management system.
HubSpot
Price: Free forever.
Get HubSpot’s Completely Free CRM
HubSpot’s free CRM is a contact management tool plus so much more. You’ll never have to manually add or update contact records — HubSpot will take care of that for you after every interaction you have with a contact. Plus, contact records are enriched automatically with data from over 20 million businesses.
The CRM and contact management system is easy to get started with, use, and navigate. In addition to contact management, other notable features include pipeline management, reporting dashboards, company insights, deal tracking, email tracking and notifications, prospect tracking, meeting scheduling, and live chat.
The CRM is entirely free forever but you can upgrade at any time to a paid plan for more features as your business scales.
ActiveCampaign
Price: Plans starting at $15 per user/ mo.
ActiveCampaign is a customer experience automation platform with a number of contact management features and capabilities.
ActiveCampaign pairs it’s contact management capabilities with your customer lifecycle — the process begins with reaching and engaging your audience, then nurturing and educating them, followed by converting and closing them, and lastly, supporting their growth. In order to begin the process of contact management, the tool will have you create a contact list.
From there, simply add existing email contacts and then organize your contacts by list, tag, or custom field. ActiveCampaign will prompt you to build segments for your customers to allow you to target and personalize content for them. This contact management solution will help you segment based on communications like emails and forms, too — then, it’ll identify and pull out behavioral actions that will teach you more about customers within those segments.
ActiveCampaign also provides case studies so you can learn about the ways that other companies similar to your own are using the software’s contact management tools and how they segment their customers.
Freshworks
Price: Plans starting at $35 per user/ mo.
Freshworks is a CRM and contact management system that helps you manage and nurture your contacts in order to create strong and lasting relationships with them. It automates contact data entry for you and provides 360-degree views of individual customers.
Freshworks tracks sales activities, manages sales tasks and appointments, and allows you to place calls or send emails without having to leave the tool. You can integrate with Google Workspace to access Gmail, Google Docs, Google Drive, and more all from Freshworks.
Pipedrive
Track emails, contact history, calls, everything in a single place and have complete visibility of your schedule with Pipedrive. It helps you grow an unlimited database of organizations and contacts and see the entire timeline of your contact history.
Manage the sales conversations from the preferred inbox and automatically receive emails linked to contacts and deals. You can directly make calls from the web for faster call recording, tracking, and insights.
Pipedrive allows you to set up meetings with your invitees by setting a mutual time between both sides. Set your schedules to check and manage activities and save time. Besides, you can send trackable proposals, contracts, and quotes to notify when the document opens.
Furthermore, Pipedrive offers many features, including contacts map, file attachments, customizable signatures, reports and insights, security, integrations, and mobile apps. Choose your deal starting at $12.50/month/user with a FREE trial.
Monday.com
Monday.com allows you to handle all your business contacts in a single place so that you will never miss any leads and be on the top when it comes to sales. Contact cards give full context by showing every contact-related data like tasks, documents, activities, and deals.
Track each activity of your contacts using a timeline and gain visibility into what needs to be done to enhance your business growth. Maintain good customer relationships by providing what they need.
Monitor team performance to gain clarity over the impact of your business through high-level dashboards. Monday.com is a flexible, secure, and scalable work OS that power your business to perform fast.
Integrate with multiple tools you use to make your work even more streamlined, from managing contacts and receiving calls to getting a 360-degree view of every customer. Take the FREE trial of the plan you like according to your business needs.
Freshsales
Track contacts’ communication, improve customer engagement, develop long-lasting relationships, and unify data with Freshsales. You will get complete details of your sales and marketing contacts in your database.
Freshsales allows you to make strategies and run campaigns to drive more conversions through greater engagement. Allow your team to have all the essential information to avoid inefficiencies in communications.
The Activity Timeline gives you a chronological view of customer engagement. You can also check website activities, gain visibility of the audience engagement and email activities. Improve your sales productivity by ranking hottest leads, speed up sales prospecting, managing the sales teams across geographies, etc.
Maximize your team efficiency by running successful campaigns, prioritizing prospects, converting emails to contacts, setting up internal alerts, and providing unified experiences. Try it for FREE or take a growth plan at $15/user/month.
Insightly
Insightly is a popular contact management program, boasting the ability to connect to over 40 different apps to aggregate data, including Slack, Box, and Evernote.Advertisement
Insightly also focuses on business relationships, and can assist in discovering hierarchies at organizations, and build relationship maps which can help to increase sales via tools such as automated lead management and automatic tracked emails. For new users of the platform, there is a series of tutorials and webinars to get you up to speed quickly.
Insightly offers free trials, with the paid plans starting with the Plus plan, which is appropriate for smaller organizations as it has a fairly basic feature set.
The Professional plan offers additional voice and business intelligence options, as well as developer API support and increased limits. The Enterprise plan offers the fullest range of features available.
Maximizer CRM
Maximizer CRM is a business software solution with a robust feature set to cover contact management duties.Advertisement
Features include a shared address book that can perform searches by a case number or company affiliation and even save them, processes can be automated easily, multi-level security for hierarchical access to control who has access to what data, and integrated with a mobile friendly calendar. Data entry can also be simplified with form field validation that can specify which fields are mandatory, and check for duplicate entries.
Maximizer is billed annually and hosted on your own server. A 30-day free trial and a 60-day money back guarantee are also available. There is also a solution whereby the firm hosts the software in the cloud, though this increases the cost per user monthly, billed annually.
Bigin
Bigin ranks first overall on our list due to its simplicity, features, and affordable price point. It’s an easy-to-use but deeply customizable contact manager perfect for small businesses.
I love how perfectly tailored this software is to small-to-medium teams. Everything is organized in an appealing, intuitive way. So, no matter who’s picking up the ball, they know exactly how to approach the conversation with a lead.
The built-in telephony features are fantastic for keeping every contact updated after every touch point. And, you can deploy simple automations to do the same for manual actions, triggers, or one-click workflows.
What’s even better for small teams is that this is all in the free forever version of Bigin.
You’re limited in a few meaningful ways. Bigin Free only allows one user and one pipeline, a maximum of 500 contacts, and limits on how you build those automations.
So, it’s pretty streamlined. But if you’re just managing a small pool on one pipeline, Bigin can work for you.
But, it’s the single paid plan that really wows me and earns the “best overall” title.
Here’s a sampling of what you get for just $7/user per month:
- 50,000 contacts
- 5 pipelines
- 2 free data backups per month
- Custom fields, list views, and dashboards
- More automation options
- Google and Office 365 integrations
- Add 10,000 more contacts for an additional $1/month
At that price point, you’re getting a lot more control for your dollar than most other contact management options. You’re able to customize everything you need to store the right information about your contacts. Roll that into the automation capabilities of the software and you’ll have a comprehensive database that’s always up-to-date.
Get started with Bigin today by trying out the free plan. This simple yet mighty software can do a lot to improve your contact management and, by extension, your sales.
Nutshell
Nutshell is a customer management solution that can organize contacts and conversations, track leads, automate sales processes, and track it all with easily understandable performance reports. Its easy to use, and the idea is that this is the tool the sales team will actually use.Advertisement
Towards that end, they offer features such as on-boarding assistance to be up and running in under 24 hours, and accessible support available for no extra charge via phone, email and chat. Nutshell has both iOS and Android apps available to support use on the go.
A 14-day free trial is offered without a credit card. The paid plans begin with the Starter tier which can support a single sales pipeline, standard sales reporting, and offers team collaboration capabilities. There is also the Pro midrange tier, and the top-level plan is Pro Plus which is suitable for more complex needs.
Conclusion:
Small business owners often use whichever programs are available. But before you do, consider using dedicated small business software to manage your contacts. Using the right contact management and CRM for small businesses can make a big difference in how efficiently your business runs and how much you accomplish.