CRM software is used by businesses to streamline marketing and communications. It helps startups and enterprises alike improve their customer support and interactions while automating and optimizing much of the sales process. Whether your company uses spreadsheets to manage operations, wants to modernize its sales processes, or is a startup that’s just getting going, a CRM system can help consolidate all your customer information into one platform.
It often takes time, effort, and multiple trials to figure out which CRM software is best suited for you and understand how to use it. Companies unsure about transitioning to a CRM may benefit from first sampling a free version. This way, they won’t be losing any money if a specific CRM doesn’t work well for their business.
No matter what you do, keeping track of your contacts is crucial to your day-to-day operations. Whether you’re running your own small business, trying to keep track of customers or prospective clients or keep in touch with friends and family, good contact management is important for productivity and growth every day. A lot of businesses turn to free CRM software to handle portions of their contact management. There are some good CRM software solutions available on the market. They can give you great assistance in terms of keeping records of all your contacts and keeping track of different marketing strategies for each of them. Free CRMs are specifically designed for ease of use, time efficiency, and system integration. Your best bet is to look at a list of the best free CRMs.
Freshsales
Benefits:
Freshsales is a full-fledged sales force automation solution for sales teams. It provides everything a salesperson needs to— attract quality leads, engage in contextual conversations, drive deals with AI-powered insights, and nurture customer relationships.
With built-in email, phone, chat, and telephony, Freshsales empowers sales teams with more time for selling by automating the sales process and increases efficiency and productivity in their daily activities. With Freddy AI, salespeople can get insights into the best deals to go after and what actions to take and predict revenue with sales forecasting. Businesses can take the next step forward towards powerful pipeline management with Freshsales. Also, the option to use native CPQ makes generating and sharing quotes and other vital sales assets hassle-free.
Drawbacks:
Like many vendors, some of the better features are reserved for premium packages. Among these for Freshworks CRM are time-based workflows, some chatbot tools and advanced metric reporting. But overall, the free and basic plans are a decent place to start, and you can always upgrade.
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.
Hubspot
HubSpot CRM was built around HubSpot’s focus on customer and client engagement. Its free CRM plan provides the features needed to start tracking clients and prospect interactions as well as access to some of HubSpot’s marketing features. HubSpot’s free CRM tools include lead and contact tracking, ticketing systems to manage customer support, and marketing tools such as email templates and a website messenger tool.
As your needs grow, you can upgrade to add CRM and marketing tools with the HubSpot Sales Hub, Marketing Hub, and more.
The platform works with G Suite and Microsoft Office, making implementation and data syncing seamless. Integration with Zapier facilitates easy information sharing and task management across apps like Google Sheets, Facebook Lead Ads, Slack, and more).
The non-free, paid add-on packages for HubSpot CRM boost data storage, generate more sophisticated reports, and incorporate new AI and advanced automation tech.
Drawbacks:
The free CRM has many features, but a lot of them aren’t that robust, which means you may find yourself having to shell out for Marketing, Sales, or Service Hub products. Customizability is limited, which might make the CRM hard for certain niche small businesses to tweak and meaningfully implement.
Insightly
Insightly is a CRM platform that’s designed for small- and mid-size business (SMBs) looking to improve their lead management and boost sales capabilities. Insightly offers a forever-free plan that provides everything users need to manage projects, record sales, and track contacts.
Insightly specializes in ensuring your business offers customers the best possible customer support. The platform is aesthetically appealing, with easy-to-use dashboards, cloud-based deployment, and it’s own superb customer service.
Customizability is a major part of Insightly’s attraction. You can also build custom apps and data visualizations to track key metrics without knowing any developer stuff; just click through options and drag-and-drop elements into place. You can manage organizational security for specific modules, contact records, etc. by setting permissions by business role and/or department.
The platform has native integration with both G Suite and Microsoft 365, as well as Mailchimp, Slack, Dropbox, QuickBooks, and a ton of other apps.
Drawbacks:
The free version of the CRM is capped at two users and has no data backup system, as well as mass emailing daily limits and limits on custom fields per record. In a similar vein, you need to get a paid plan to get access to more detailed, useful lead assignment modules.
Apptivo
Benefits:
Apptivo’s cloud-based suite of business solutions focuses on customizability. They dish out their starter version free of charge for up to three users. which offers a lot of the core tools included in paid plans, as well as 500MB of storage.
Apptivo’s contact app (for contact management) makes it easy to import data from emails and websites, allowing you to harvest lead, client, and customer data without any tedious manual entry. Apptivo’s project management apps provide team and individual organization tools.
Apptivo’s Cases app helps you manage customer issues and interactions, automatically turning customer emails into tickets. It integrates with CRM, project management, invoicing, and every other app in the Apptivo universe, meaning all pertinent information is always available to team members.
If you outgrow the free plan, you’ll find that Apptivo’s pricing plans are very reasonable, and all the features are bundled together (rather than sold separately), which is refreshingly simple.
Drawbacks:
The free version of Apptivo has no marketing tools and does not support third-party integrations, limiting is usefulness. Meanwhile, the app’s user interface does the job, but can be a bit unintuitive.
Conclusion: CRM makes running several different departments of a growing business easier, faster, and possibly more fun. So long as one never forgets the ultimate aim is to have better engagements with customers, both prospects and paying. Those customers are people after all, not mere datasets.