There are plenty of free sales software available today. Many small business owners, however, find themselves overwhelmed with the number of options, not knowing which is the best free sales software for their needs.
While there are many options out there, choosing the best CRM for your startup or small business can be a daunting task. This brief guide will help you wade through the options and take side-by-side comparisons.
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.
Pricing:
- There is a Free Forever Startup plan
- Growth plan is $15 per user/month billed annually
- Pro plan is $39 per user/month billed annually
- Enterprise plan is $69 per user/month billed annually
Less Annoying CRM
Benefits:
Less Annoying CRM (aka LACRM) is designed as an all-inclusive CRM solution for small businesses. They offer a long 30-day free trial. After that, they have a single, low-cost paid plan.
LACRM handles task management, lead-to-sale, contact management, and follow-ups. Manage all your customer data, track your leads through sales pipelines. Stay on top of events and to-dos (in easy-to-use calendar and agenda formats). Makes a great real estate crm.
Emails written and received outside a CRM platform can be logged inside LACRM. The app provides every user with a unique email logging address. You can create a contact with whatever email provider you use.
Drawbacks:
There are minimal app integrations, which might be a significant limitation, depending on your needs. The app sends out notifications by SMS or email, but not in-app, which feels a bit retro.
Pricing:
- $15 per user/per month, billed monthly.
LACRM offers a risk-free, 30-day free trial for its only pricing plan.
EngageBay (Web, iOS, Android)
It’s getting harder each year to find a free CRM that provides sales, service, and marketing functions. Understandably so. That’s a lot to ask for a freemium app. EngageBay, a relatively new kid on the block, is one of the few gratis all-in-ones left. Not only that, the company makes upgrading to paid plans very affordable.
The app comes with 500 contacts, and each contact record shows a 360-degree view. Visible (when applicable) are activities, emails, deals, tasks, notes, workflows, chats, events, and other touchpoints that allow users to see how a contact has interacted with your company over time.
Create multiple—one of the few to allow this option—customizable pipelines for different sales processes or products. Sales sequences, which let you create, schedule, and track a series of automated, personalized emails for following up with contacts and leads, is another feature usually not found in a free plan. Sequences are also found under the marketing module, with the same setup process and functionality.
The marketing suite includes lead scoring, forms, pop-ups, email templates, landing pages, newsletters, and other tools to both capture and nurture contacts. EngageBay offers a nice selection of templates for these tools, or you can create your own from scratch. I created a newsletter pop-up for my personal website using one of the templates and launched it by adding some code to the HTML.
While creating automated workflows is only available in the two highest-tiered paid accounts, you can design and send emails and videos to your segmented lists. The social suite lets you add and monitor your Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram accounts. I connected my Twitter account, and within a few seconds, my feed, mentions, and retweets popped up on the screen. From here, you can also schedule posts for channels.
For basic support management, the service suite provides ticket creation, automated assignment, and a dashboard for tracking ticket priority, first response time, and ticket count. With the live chat feature, you can create an additional support or sales channel and then track total chats, chat duration, and first response time in the dashboard. I tested the chat tool on my site, and while it’s fairly basic, for those new to chat and/or those running a small business, it should be adequate.
Stretch EngageBay’s functionality even more by connecting it to Zapier. For example, you can add new EngageBay contacts to your email marketing tool or add new customers from your eCommerce site to EngageBay.
EngageBay Price: Free for 15 users; all-in-one paid plans from $10.79/month/user
Bitrix24 (Web, Windows, Mac, iOS, Android)
With most CRMs, especially free versions, you are limited to a certain number of users and contacts. Bitrix24 is the lone exception in our selection to offer unlimited for both (HubSpot offers unlimited users and 1 million contacts). This, combined with its other features, makes it stand out from the crowd. Aside from contact and deal management, the app also has team collaboration tools such as workgroups, chat, internal activity streams, and polls.
Bitrix24’s many features make it feel a bit overwhelming at first, but you can hide, delete, and change the order of the various menu items. Then, from inside each menu item (e.g., CRM), you can configure the order of items (e.g., deals, contacts, companies, analytics). If you ever want to see everything at a glance, click the Sitemap icon toward the bottom-left of the menu.
With unlimited users, you can invite your entire team to use Bitrix24, slotting them into the app departments you create. Once your employees accept the invite, they’ll be given access to their own customizable version of the app. However, you must upgrade to the paid versions to assign permissions to each user for viewing and making changes.
In a contact record, you can configure the menu to show only what’s important to your company, and you can add fields or rearrange them while you’re in a record just by dragging and dropping. For each record, you get all the details and functions (email, call, notes, etc.) at-a-glance with no need to click around a record just to see activities. Clicking on the Profile tab toward the top of a record shows you various reports related to the contact, such as sales, calls, emails, and activities. The entirety of these activities is calculated as a “communication load” or the number of activities per deal that’s acceptable to your company. This can show you how specific customers like to communicate to better understand them for future opportunities.
Within the Activity Stream, you can chat internally, assign tasks, design and distribute a company poll, and make announcements to your entire team. Clicking on Workgroups lets you create private or public spaces to collaborate on work, assign tasks, share a calendar, and develop knowledge bases. Invite employees or external contacts to each group.
You could spend weeks learning all the available features, so to make good use of your time, pick a few goals (e.g., get my team communicating only using Bitrix24), focus on these, become proficient, and move on to a new set of goals.
Bitrix24 Price: Free for unlimited users and unlimited contacts; paid plans from $34/month for 5 users
Freshworks CRM
Best free CRM for small teams
SPECIFICATIONS
Number of users: UnlimitedContact limit: UnlimitedMobile app: Android, iOSSupport: 24/5 phone, email, and chatTODAY’S BEST DEALSVISIT SITE
REASONS TO BUY
+Calling functionality+Unlimited users+Generous support options
REASONS TO AVOID
-No reporting -No email integration-No workflow automation
Freshworks CRM packs a competitive feature set in its free plan, the highlights being in-built calls, unlimited users, and a generous support package. The core CRM functionality includes contact management, call and email logging, deal status, and customer-facing chat functionality.
The ability to add unlimited users is a rare feature; but with no workflow automation, a growing team would perform increasing manual work. For example, you can set tasks and reminders linked to a deal, but can’t trigger them to happen when the deal status changes.Advertisement
Managing contacts and deals is intuitive, as the software prompts you to import new data and update deals. Although advanced features like custom fields aren’t available, small teams can still benefit from the in-built phone, plus the call and email logging function. Lead generation is limited, but Freshworks can pull leads from webforms: this is valuable if you have substantial website traffic.
Conclusion
We’ve put together a list of the TOP CRM Systems that are 100% free for small business owners. We’ve looked at all the systems and picked the best, most user friendly ones so you don’t have to go through all that hassle.