Jumping your ship over to some other platform is not the best way if that is what you are pondering. You should rather be looking into switching over to good crm software for small business australia.
A better alternative would be to look into call management software. It will help you in making your business tight-knit and at the same time tight-knit with your customers.
Salesforce
In the world of CRM software, Salesforce is an absolute industry leader with a 19.5% market share in 2018. Its biggest advantages are that it’s comprehensive, highly customisable and reliable. This comes with a price though. Salesforce Sales Professional costs A$105 per user, per month, and is generally considered to be the best solution for large businesses that can afford this.
However, Salesforce does offer a cheaper option, Salesforce Essentials, which is quite popular with small and medium businesses in Australia. It costs A$35 per user per month and there’s a 14-day trial period. This plan is particularly handy for smaller companies, as it provides features especially convenient for them, such as territory-based lead assignment and reporting.
The issue with Salesforce Essentials is that you can add only up to 10 users, which should be enough for smaller companies, but this can create scalability issues once your business starts growing.
Among other features that are available only in the Professional plan, are lead scoring, 24-hour phone support, sales forecasting, campaigns, and some invoicing features. Functionalities like lead capture, mass emails, customer support cases, as well as highly-configurable reports and dashboards are included in both plans.
Aside from all the bells and whistles that Salesforce offers, it’s worth noting that the software can be quite complex to get set up and many customer comment of the lack of support available. Smaller organisation also comment that despite the attraction of the numerous features, most are never used so the value proposition is undermined.
Price
- Free Version: No
- Essential: from AU$35 per user/month
- Professional: from AU$105 per user/month
- Enterprise: from AU$210 per user/month
- Unlimited: from AU$420 per user/month
Features
- Opportunity Management
- Lead Management
- High level of customisation
- AI Automation
- Complex software for enterprise businesses
Best for: Number of features Freshworks CRM
Freshworks CRM (formerly Freshsales) organises your customer and sales processes into one easy-to-use platform – from sales and marketing to data management. It boasts a genuinely impressive list of features, including an advanced AI tool, nicknamed ‘Freddy’. Freddy gives you data to back up every decision, helping you to identify leads based on how likely they are to convert.
What type of small business is Freshworks CRM best suited for?
Freshworks CRM was launched in 2011 after its co-founders struggled to find a CRM system with enough features to cater to their demands. You can see this goal reflected in the system’s huge number of available tools and integrations. Even its lowest-tier payment plan, Freshworks Growth, includes:
- 1,000 marketing contacts
- Freddy AI
- Web forms
- Website tracking
- Built-in phone and email integration, as well as a mobile app
- Lists and Segments
- Drag-and-drop journey builder
- Visual sales pipeline
- Collaboration with Slack
- 20 workflows
- 5 sales sequences
- Custom reports and dashboards
- Migration from other CRMs
- Freshdesk integration
- Freshworks marketplace to view and access the most popular user add-ons
This USP makes Freshworks best for companies wanting a CRM with the maximum number of capabilities. That means small business owners with a more complicated sales pipeline would benefit most from a subscription.
One drawback to the Freshworks system is that it has an individual email limit of just 200 emails a day, per user for its lowest-tier payment plan. Given that most small businesses will use email as the primary way to connect, this might prove troublesome for firms looking to engage in marketing outreach.
Pricing
In terms of pricing, Freshworks CRM is the most expensive option in this list. It offers a free version suitable for solo users, with only 100 contacts permitted. The next step up is the Growth plan which, at £25 per user, per month when billed annually, is a big investment for small businesses. You get what you pay for with a long list of features, but we would recommend trialling the free version before committing to Freshworks CRM long-term.
| Free | Growth | Pro | Enterprise | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price per month (billed annually) | Free | £25 per user | £55 per user | £99 per user |
| Price per month (billed monthly) | Free | £29 per user | £69 per user | £119 per user |
| Users | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Contacts | 100 | 1,000 | 3,000 | 5,000 |
| Storage limit | 1GB per user | 2GB per user | 5GB per user | 100GB per user |
Verdict
Having such a long list of features means that few users will be left unsatisfied with the capabilities of Freshworks CRM.
Monday.com
Best for: Customisation
Monday.com might be primarily known as a project management tool, but you can easily customise the app for CRM thanks to its intuitive interface and huge number of creative features. The app is organised around a simple traffic-light system that categorises your workflow as either green (it’s completed), orange (I’m working on it), or red (I’m stuck), helping you to design a system that personnalises the status of every customer relationship.
What type of small business is Monday.com best suited for?
The platform has a generous inventory of features, many of which allow for innovative customer relationship management. We think Monday.com works best for creative industries and businesses with unique client needs, such as design or estate agencies.
Whether you’re looking to track and organise your marketing activities, deals, client onboarding, or projects, Monday.com hosts lots of customisable elements, including:
- Custom fields
- 200+ dashboard templates
- Full mobile CRM
- Document management
- Custom apps
- Unlimited contacts
- Unlimited users
Pricing
Monday.com has a distinctive payment structure which is based on a set number of seats. For more information, read our monday.com pricing guide.
| Individual | Basic | Standard | Pro | Enterprise | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price per month (billed annually) | Free | £7 seat/month | £9 seat/month | £14 seat/month | Contact sales |
| Price per month (billed monthly) | Free | £12 seat/month | £27 seat/month | £42 seat/month | Contact sales |
| Users | Up to two | Minimum of three | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Storage | 500MB | 5GB | 20GB | 100GB | 1000GB |
Verdict
Despite being best known for project management, Monday.com is a surprisingly good CRM tool. The platform has excellent customisability to give a personal touch to your CRM needs – we’d recommend it for creative teams in design or marketing.
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. Add new Engagebay contacts to a Mailchimp list as subscribersUse this ZapAdd new Shopify customers to EngageBay as contactsUse this ZapSee more EngageBay Marketing integrations powered by
EngageBay Price: Free for 15 users; all-in-one paid plans from $10.79/month/user
Zoho
A strong rival to Salesforce, Zoho is a CRM system that is best known for being very useful when it comes to social media management. It improves communication via various social channels, and also makes publishing posts and tracking interactions much easier.
This CRM also takes pride in extensive and reliable analytics provided by the SalesSignals feature, which will provide you with crucial insights for every customer in real-time. Moreover, it’s super-customisable, as its REST API opens room for custom integrations and solutions. You can also add numerous extensions using Zoho Marketplace for marketing, service, project management and finance, to name but a few, yet rarely is is suggested that these are best-of-breed products.
Zoho does offer a Free CRM solution, though what was once a generous offer has been cut back over the years. The features are now quite limited and it is limited to just three users. However, for very small teams that need just the basic functionalities, Zoho’s free solution could still do a very good job. Zoho’s paid plans start from US$12 per user per month for the Standard plan.
Checking in on customer feedback, Zoho scores less favourably, particularly when it comes to customer service.
Price
- Free Version: Yes
- Starter: from $12 per user/month
- Professional: from $20 per user/month
- Enterprise: from $35 per user/month
- Ultimate: from $100 per user per month
Features
- Sales Force Automation
- Lead Management
- Process Management
- Multiple Add-on Integrations
- Social Media Integration
Bitrix24 (Web, Windows, Mac, iOS, Android) Best free CRM software with unlimited users and contacts
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.
Conclusion
It makes great sense to be an advanced entrepreneur by optimizing your business’s cash flow with right cash advance requirements. It is well known fact that every business, no matter how big or small will experience peaks and troughs in activity. When you buy the best crm software to manage your sales pipeline, you can now manage sales sales leads automatically through time to give your business better reporting.