Startups are faced with the challenge of finding a free startup CRM as well as a powerful one that could manage a large number of contacts. It is important to have a single-window dashboard where you could see your sales, marketing, and support contact information. In this day and age. CRM software is a necessary component for startups if they want to succeed. CRM stands for customer relationship management. Basically, it’s software that lets you have data on your customers so that you can sell to them more effectively. If you’re a startup and you’re looking for the best CRM to manage and grow your business, this guide will provide you with all of the information that you need.
HubSpot
HubSpot is a household name in the sales and marketing world and their CRM software is one of the best tools for all types of businesses.
In fact, HubSpot is one of the best types of CRM software created for inbound marketing. The tool enables you to manage your social media presence and content, streamline your sales funnel, and do other digital activities. It is also easy to use and is scalable.
Pros
- Understands salespeople’s needs
- Powerful features
- Well-integrated with Hubspot’s other tools
- It is easy to use
- Free (basic) version available
- Good customer support
Cons
- The paid version of the CRM software can be costly
- Built for marketers, later adapted for salespeople
Copper
Copper is perfect if you want a CRM platform that is powerful but not complex, perfect for your startup. It is an efficient sales management tool and handles bulk emails with ease.
You and your team will be able to view everybody’s tasks and ensure that all leads are followed upon.
Pros
- Automated data entry
- Great Gmail integration
- Simple UI
- Good mobile version
- Great customer support
Cons
- Can be slow
- Cannot always see data entries
- Pricey for larger teams
ClickUp
ClickUp is one of the world’s highest-rated productivity and startup management software used by teams in small and large companies.
With ClickUp, you can use tags to organize your accounts, get a geographic view of your clients with the Map view, and automatically assign tasks for each stage of your sales pipeline.
In addition, with ClickUp’s Free Forever Plan, your startup can invest the money you would’ve spent on software into your business!
Features
- Flexible CRM views: visualize your accounts, customer orders, or sales pipeline in a List, Board, Table, and more
- Dashboards: keep an eye on your customer lifetime value, average deal sizes, sales team’s performance, and more
- Custom Statuses: create custom stages that work for your unique sales process
- Custom Fields: add custom detail to your sales workflow to track orders, hot leads, scoring, and more
- Email ClickApp: keep conversations in one place by sending and receiving emails directly from ClickUp tasks
- Form view: quickly gather customer data and automatically create tasks from responses
- Privacy, Guests, and Permissions: control who has access to your Workspace
- Proofing and Annotations: work alongside clients on projects and contracts
- Formula Fields: automatically calculate the cost of a new product order or scoring for a new lead
- Reminders: set reminders so you never forget you’ve got an upcoming client meeting
- Templates: use Templates for CRM, Account Management, Customer Service, and more
- Workflow Automation: let ClickUp automatically apply a new Template, post comments, move statuses, and more so you can focus on the important stuff
- Zoom Integration: start a Zoom meeting with customers right within a ClickUp task
Pros
- Powerful free CRM for startups that lets you have unlimited users
- User-friendly interface with online and Offline Mode
- Make sure your team knows which tasks to work on first with task dependencies
- Give clients accurate project time frames with time estimates
- Create onboarding docs, wikis, SOPs, proposals, and more with Docs
- Collaborate with teammates using the Chat view
- Make sure your customer support team tackles tasks in the right order with task priorities
- Manage client deadlines and meetings the way you want to with Google Calendar syncing
- Integrates with every popular Google App, including Google Drive, Hangouts Chats, Google Assistant, and more
- Create tasks, notes, and Docs using our powerful iOS and Android Mobile Apps
- Supports Apple, Windows, and Linux platforms
ClickUp Limitations
No Table view in the mobile app (yet).
Keap
Keap is another great sales and marketing automation platform for beginners. Keap helps you and your business find and convert leads more effectively, follow-up faster, keep all your tools in one place.
There are hundreds of integrations with Keap. Some include:
- Zapier
- Gmail
- Outlook
- WordPress and more
With Keap you can create personalized follow-ups, in turn generating more leads. Tag contacts to generate and trigger automations that rely on your customer’s activity and data.
Even though Keap can be costly, the features are worth the customer reach and satisfaction you and your business gets.
Pros
- Great marketing features
- Simple UI
- Good lead generation and follow-up
- Customization
- Many integrations
Cons
- Costly
Close
First up is Close. This is my #1 pick as the best CRM for small businesses, because of their intense focus on cutting down time spent on activities that don’t move you toward actually closing more deals—plus they’re actually the only CRM on the market that comes with built-in calling, making it a steal if calling is part of your sales process.
Close is really geared toward reducing mundane tasks like data entry and contact field updating, so you can maximize the time you spend contacting, developing, and closing leads. What takes 8 clicks to do in a bulkier CRM like Salesforce, takes just 2 in Close. And for small businesses that are focused on what’s most important (closing more sales), the time you’ll save in the long run with a CRM that isn’t bloated with occasionally used features, translates into real dollars.
For both small businesses and startups, this intense focus on driving more revenue, is the most vital part of growing your business today. And when you’re busting your ass trying to keep your highest priority leads on track, and spending time managing at least some of the deals yourself, Close will seriously be a lifesaver.
What I like most about Close, is their extremely easy-to-use Email Sequences feature set, that allows me to send an automated series of (customized) drip sales emails to new client leads that come in either automatically from my blog, or from manual list imports after something like attending a trade show or presenting on a big webinar.
Agile
Unlike our previous contenders in the race to be the best CRM for small businesses, Agile makes the cut because it touts itself as an “all-in-one” solution for small businesses. And unlike your all-in-one shampoo-conditioner-body-wash-lotion-dish-soap-detergent, Agile actually works pretty well across multiple different business areas.
Agile has three main areas of focus:
- Sales enablement
- Marketing automation
- Customer service
There are basically two ways a CRM can work—by offering a lot of services you can use through their platform, or offering a few core services themselves and integrating really well with the other tools and services you already use. Agile is one of the best CRMs for small businesses because it does a decent job of being your go-to business management software, the closest thing to a one-stop shop you’ll find. By far their biggest strength is reporting, where you can get a thorough and comprehensive look at anything you want, grouping statistics by deals, calls, activities, and growth.
Conclusion
With limited time, money, and processes at their disposal, entrepreneurs often seek out the best new software to manage an otherwise overwhelming task of keeping track of customer details. CRMs can help small businesses gain valuable insight into analytics, communication with clients, and the progress of sales. Use the free online customer relationship management solutions in this article to help you grow your startup business.