A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system is a must-have for any business. It tracks everything from prospects to customers and contacts. It’s something you should never start your business without because it allows you to stay organized and keep track of important data about the people who support your company.
This article lists some great CRM software that you can use to help you grow your small business and improve efficiency.
Keap – best CRM for small business
Keap started in 2001 and now has more than 200,000 users, which makes it one of the top CRM software solutions. Features include marketing automation, lead scoring, management, segmentation and distribution. It is designed mostly for customers that focus on long term growth. Due to this, Keap is among the best CRMs for small businesses.
Keap lets you do drip campaigns, send automated emails, conduct surveys and send auto-responses. The user interface is very simple and intuitive with an option to add widgets and 3rd party integrations such as LeadPages, Calendly, ClickFunnels, Zapier and more.
Keap offers a pro package for $105 a month for a single user.
Key features and advantages:
- Customer Relationship Management tools
- Contact management
- Email marketing tools
- Financial CRM
- Landing page
- Lead management tools
- Customer support
- Marketing reports
- Activity monitoring
- Invoices
Pipedrive
Pipedrive was launched in 2010 and its users like its great visualisation of the sales pipeline and intuitive interface. It contains highly customised templates that you can use with various integrations with other software tools such as Zapier, Zoom and Trello.
Prices start at $12.5/month, which makes it a great option for small and medium-sized businesses. It has 2GB of cloud storage and smart contact data which takes care of customer segmentation.
It’s great if you have separate sales teams because you can track the goals, achievements and success rate of each of them individually. The only disadvantage is that it has a limit of 1,000 email subscribers. Pipedrive also has its own mobile app.
Key features and advantages:
- Customer Relationship Management tools
- Contact management
- AI chatbot
- Financial CRM
- Healthcare CRM
- Lead management tools
- Customer support
Streak
Benefits:
Streak provides a fully integrated Gmail CRM built into your inbox. Piggybacking off this familiar everyday software tool, the app makes CRM adoption easy for new users.
The free version of Streak, intended for personal use (i.e. freelancers and solo entrepreneurs), includes basic CRM tools and pretty comprehensive email features. Email templates allow you to personalize emails and send them out at high volume, a far more effective alternative to generic mass-blast email marketing.
To populate your mail lists, you can effortlessly pull contact information and data from Google Sheets using the Streak CRM Importer add-on, or import offline CSV files. This means it’s no longer necessary to fill in the blanks and email everyone one-by-one.
Email tracking gives you a heads up on who read your email, and where on earth they read it (thanks to a handy map view), as well as how many times. This is excellent for increasing visibility across your team, but particularly salesâ —when you know someone read your message and understand their behavior a bit more, you can move the sales process along by following up in a way that’s both well-timed and appropriate. You’ll be able to avoid repetitive email practices and nurture the correct customer relationships.
Call logs and meeting notes, meanwhile, help keep an easy-to-find record of your non-inbox interactions, organized chronologically and by type. You’ll also be able to manage leads and sales by creating any number of pipelines you might need (the free version provides for unlimited pipelines too). Keep in-app notes, centralize record-keeping, utilize data tracking on your contact correspondence, and find out if leads have or haven’t opened your emails.
Drawbacks:
Streak is a browser extension, which is inconvenient when it comes to changing devices, as it’ll be necessary to download the extension and log in again on every new device you access. Given that Streak is a lightweight CRM, it might not work for more complex business processes.
Pricing:
- Personal version is free for individual users.
- Professional plan is $49 per user/per month, billed annually.
- Enterprise plan is $129 per user/per month, billed annually.
Learn More: Streak
Insightly
Insightly was founded in 2009 and besides sales and marketing it’s also focused on project management. Insightly provides a high level of automation by tracking leads activity and automatically routes those leads to the correct member of your sales team.
Also, it lets you send bulk emails and track who clicked on the links or opened the email. It even links email and other activity to contacts in your database so you can have a clear vision of where the lead is in the sales pipeline, which should lead to higher conversion rates.
Insightly is all about simplicity and it contains all the essential features required by SMEs. The Plus tier, which is the cheapest option, costs $29/user/month while the most expensive one is $99/user/month.
Key features and advantages:
- Compatible with mobile devices
- Highly scalable and customisable
- Great data visualisation
- Customer relationship management tools
- Contact management
- User-friendly and intuitive
- Customer support
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.
Pricing:
- No-frills plan for up to 2 users is free.
- Plus is $29 per user/per month, billed annually.
- Professional is $49 per user/per month, billed annually.
- Enterprise is $99 per user/per month, billed annually.
- A 14-day free trial is available for the Plus and Professional plans.
Learn More: Insightly
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.
Pricing:
- Starter plan is free for up to three users.
- Premium plan is $8 per user/per month, billed annually.
- Ultimate plan is $20 per user/per month, billed annually.
Learn More: Apptivo
SuiteCRM
Benefits:
SuiteCRM offers a free, open source solution that covers sales, service, support, and marketing functions. It has a relatively low learning curve and short set-up time, making it one of the most popular pieces of open source software on the market.
A real-time dashboard syncs incoming data so that you gain timely insights on open project statuses, pipeline metrics, and revenues/expenses.
If you have an IT department (or.. an IT person or two), they will be very pleased with the custom layout, module, and relationship development tools the CRM vendor supplies. The ability to customize, and the large number of add-ons available on the web, allow SuiteCRM to deal with applications at pretty much all complexity levels. It also works on basically any OS imaginable, i.e. Windows, OS/X, Ubuntu, Android, and iOS.
Drawbacks:
Helpdesk support comes from the SuiteCRM community, which can make getting answers somewhat slow. As one might expect, the free version is limited in some respects: integrations and features are less robust than in the paid versions of the product. In general, the vendor doesn’t offer any ERP software integrations, so this may be an issue if you’re looking for a do-everything platform for your business.
Open source often translates to ‘higher learning curve,’ and that is still the case with SuiteCRM.
Pricing for SuiteCRM: OnDemand:
- Pure SuiteCRM is free.
- Starter plan (recommended for 1-10 users) is $123 (billed as £95) per month, billed annually.
- Business plan (recommended for 5-50 users) is $430 (billed as £332.50) per month, billed annually.
- Premium plan (recommended for 10-150 users) is $614 (billed as £475) per month, billed annually.
A 30-day free trial is available for all SuiteCRM: OnDemand hosted solution plans.
Agile CRM
Benefits:
Agile CRM offers a free all-in-one business platform with project management, contact view, reporting, support/service, and timeline features.
Customer ticketing for support teams offers feedback forms, helpdesk, knowledge database, and everything else you need to keep churn down and boost the customer experience. Integrations with RingCentral and Twilio enhance the built-in telephony features of Agile CRM, ensuring conversation tracking, call recording, and deal-making over the phone lines is organized and super effective.
You can automate upcoming voice calls and follow-ups by putting your appointment calendar online. You can also attach documents in-app within the deal process, company and contact profiles, and emails.
Drawbacks:
If you upgrade from free to the Starter plan, the price jump is totally reasonable, but if you scale up again to Regular, you’ll find yourself paying over 3x more per user. This feels somewhat unfair, and it creates a notable financial obstacle for using the platform as your business scales. Customization options are limited.
Pricing:
- Free version available for up to 10 users.
- Starter version is $8.99 per user/per month (billed every two years)
- Regular version is $29.99 per user/per month (billed every two years)
- Enterprise version is $47.99 per user/per month (billed every two years)
Airtable
Benefits:
A non-traditional, lightweight CRM with a very on-point design aesthetic and breezy ease of use. The free version of the software is pretty useful, with unlimited ‘bases’ (i.e. flexible workbooks that can contain different-yet-related spreadsheets). You can put 1,200 records in each base, with each base having an attachment data cap of 2 GB.
Airtable’s workflow management database aims to re-invent the spreadsheet, allowing users to link data from different sets and interpret them easily. Importing and exporting data from .CSV is a cinch.
Probably the main reason people love Airtable is the fact its software puts a premium on creativity and personalization. The drag-and-drop dashboard allows you to generate custom fields, and populate them with everything from attachments, run-on long-form text notes, checkboxes, links to records in other tables, and yes, even barcodes.
The result of these ‘souped up spreadsheets’ is all-in-one collaboration platform that provides general CRM functionality for people who might be allergic to most business tools (i.e. creatives, editorial teams, and the like). This makes it a viable choice for teams that require a mix of analytic, organizational, and communications features.
Drawbacks:
It’s worth remembering that Airtable never set out to be a full-stack, conventional business CRM. This shows in its overall lightweight CRM features. More complicated work processes and task management will probably be too much for the platform to handle.
Pricing:
- Free version provides essential features.
- Plus version is $10 per user/per month, billed annually.
- Pro version is $20 per user/per month, billed annually.
- Enterprise version pricing is in consultation with vendor.
Learn More: Airtable
Zoho CRM
Zoho CRM was founded in 2015 and is one of the most recognised CRM solutions with hundreds of different integrations and capabilities. Depending on the size of your business Zoho offers a free CRM software solution that allows up to 3 users, with an option for paid plans starting from $12 per user per month.
You get access to Zoho’s suite of other business apps, and it can be integrated with apps such as Campaigns and SalesIQ. Syncing Campaigns with your CRM allows you to create a contact list for campaigns that can be run via email or different social media channels such as Facebook and LinkedIn.
SalesIQ gives you live chat on your website and it can also track visitors by simply installing a code snippet on your website. In this way you can answer questions from your potential customers or schedule sales calls with them.
In comparison to other tools, the Zoho interface is more suitable for people who have previous experience with CRM. It also offers features such as sales analytics and insights that can report anomalies by analysing the data automatically. Zoho’s most famous feature is the lead-to-clients system that sets up an automated funnel for qualifying leads and user segmentation.
Key features and advantages:
- 15-day free trial
- Offers a mobile app version
- Customer Relationship Management tools
- Contact management
- Construction CRM
- Financial CRM
- Customer Engagement Management
- Marketing automation
- Forecasting of sales
- Customer support
Salesforce CRM
Salesforce CRM is a cloud-based solution founded in 1999 and it’s one of the most famous options on the list, with more than five million users worldwide. In comparison to other software, the Salesforce trial comes with sample data which makes it easier for new users or users who want to change their CRM to understand the UI and learn more about the system.
Although the Contact Management dashboard is relatively simple, Salesforce has a Help widget integrated into its UI. You can add and remove contacts, filter them and track relationships. There are also video guides on pretty much every potential stumbling block. The dashboard also contains functionalities such as important tasks, upcoming campaigns and appointments.
It integrates with over 5000 different apps and uses Einstein AI to improve user engagement and provide personalised content and ads to users. Pricing starts at $25/user/month with an annual subscription, while the most expensive option is $300/user/month.
Key features and advantages:
- 30-day free trial period
- Customer Relationship Management tools
- Contact Management
- Helpdesk Tools
- Lead management tools
- 24/7 customer support
- Market automation
- Multi-language support
- Cloud-hosted
- Mass emailing option
Flowlu
Benefits:
Flowlu is a cloud-based collaborative CRM with project management and knowledge base features. The free version of the product, capped at 2 users, gives you 1 TB of storage data. Build and store knowledge bases, keep track of project expenses and revenue, and handle finance and records management.
With Flowlu, you can quickly put together personalized invoices, auto-inserting CRM data into them and then sending them out in-app. You can do quotation estimates too, and generate leads with custom web forms and invite customers to upcoming events and surveys.
The free version includes an Agile Scrum component that allows you to implement scrum strategies like sprints on a visual task management board. Keep on top of issues and bug reports, track and prioritize product requirements, and streamline your workflows with flexible project tools.
Drawbacks:
The app’s task filter function isn’t the most intuitive, and collaboration tools are relatively basic. Financial reporting features are likewise somewhat lightweight and might not be robust enough for companies with more complex business processes.
Pricing:
- Free for up to two users.
- Team plan is $29 for all users/per month billed annually, and $39 for all users/per month billed monthly.
- Business plan is $59 for all users/per month billed annually, and $74 for all users/per month billed monthly.
- Professional plan is $119 for all users/per month billed annually, and $149 for all users/per month billed monthly.
- Enterprise plan is $239 for all users/per month billed annually, and $299 for all users/per month billed monthly.
Conclusion
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