Do you need to do effective and quick contact management for your small business? You should consider getting the best software for small business contact management. Finding the best contact management software for small business can be tricky, but this easy-to-follow guide will make it much simpler for you.
Software for small business contact management can make your life a whole lot easier. It’s probably something you thought of when you started doing business. You have no idea how you will manage contacts and what software is the best to manage contacts of your clients, partners, vendors, employees etc.
Zoho CRM
- Offers free plan for up to three users
- Customer support is available across multiple channels
- Has social media and desk software integrations
What’s Missing
- Needs faster customer response time
- Free plan is limited to three users
- Does not have auto-profile enrichment feature
Zoho CRM Pricing at a Glance*
- Free: Supports three users
- Bigin for Small Business: $7 per user, per month
- Standard: $14 per user, per month
- Professional: $23 per user, per month
- Enterprise: $40 per user, per month
- Ultimate: $52 per user, per month
- Zoho CRM Plus: $57 per user, per month
- Free trial of paid plans: 15 to 30 days
*Based on annual billing. Monthly subscriptions are also available at slightly higher rates.
Zoho CRM is a customizable CRM software that comes with multichannel communication capabilities, a two-way help desk software integration, social media integration, email analytics, and a native dialer. It also features a Contacts module where you can create and view contact data, set up customer accounts with multiple contacts, and assign people as active leads.
Zoho CRM’s biggest setbacks include its slow customer response time and lack of artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tools in the lower-tier plans. It is also missing advanced pipeline customization available in Salesforce Essentials and auto-profile enrichment that Freshsales offers. Nevertheless, it scored the top spot in this list because of its powerful contact management capabilities, multichannel support, ease of use, and availability of free and affordable plans.
Zoho CRM Features
Zoho CRM’s contacts management tab (Source: Zoho CRM)
- Easy to set up and operate
- Contact management features include multichannel communication, help desk integration, email analytics, lead monitoring, and native dialer
- SalesSignals gives you real-life notifications about your customer and contact activities
- Higher tiers offer Zia AI, a conversational artificial intelligence (AI) assistant that provides predictions, suggestions, and recommendations
- Analytics include charts, funnels, key performance indicators (KPIs), a target meter, an anomaly detector, customizable dashboards, and workflow reports
- Automated lead generation from social media and social interaction tracking
- Marketing and workflow automation
- Web forms and team collaboration tools
- Inventory management tools for products, price books, sales quotes, sales orders, invoices, vendors, and purchase orders
- Mobile apps for Android and iOS
- Lower-tier plans offer email, live chat, and phone support during office hours, while higher-tier plans offer 24/7 support
HubSpot
HubSpot is the gold standard for CRM software because it offers a comprehensive feature set that covers sales, marketing, support, and operational activities for free.
It seriously comes with everything you need to streamline contact management processes across your entire business. The robust free tier outshines every other free CRM out there (and even a lot of paid CRMs, too).
We’re not just talking about an extended free trial, here. In fact, you can stay on the free plan for years—maybe even forever—without exhausting all that it has to offer.
You can store contact info for up to one million contacts. HubSpot also includes unlimited user seats so you can onboard your entire team, plus anyone you end up hiring along the way.
And it’s intuitive to use once you get the hang of it. Despite HubSpot’s power and flexibility, you’ll certainly be able to onboard yourself.
It will take more time to get started than other options on our list, but it’s well worth it if you want something that offers plenty of room to grow and advanced features you don’t have to pay for.
One of the biggest reasons we love HubSpot is that you can label contacts as “marketing” or “non-marketing”. Non-marketing contacts—like vendors, freelancers, partners, and customers—are treated differently than those you’re actively marketing to, as they should be.
You don’t have to worry about accidentally sending out a mass marketing email to one of your vendors or a sales contact on the other side of the world.
HubSpot can also automatically pull enriched information about your contacts, including where they work, their position inside the company, and more, so you never have to go digging to get context into who this person is or how you should approach them.
Every plan comes with the option to add on VoIP services so you can make calls, record them, and attach them to contact records inside your account.
Doing so means you can always come back to your calls to remember what happened. You can even use them for training purposes and to ensure your team is always doing a good job when interacting with existing and potential customers.
The free plan comes with 15 free minutes per user per month. But you can buy additional minutes if you need them or integrate with your existing VoIP system instead.
While the workflow builder isn’t available on the free plan, you can still set up simple automations that’ll make your life easier and let you get more work done without sacrificing quality or hiring someone new.
You can also set up dynamic lists (the free plan includes five) that automatically sort and update themselves based on variables you collect about your contacts.
If you run a brick-and-mortar, for example, you could set up a dynamic list that only includes people who live close to your physical location. In doing so, you can speak to those contacts differently than you would someone who lives in another state.
The free plan also lets you set up an autoresponder that instantly delivers an email when someone fills out a form on your site.
While you don’t get the option of creating custom automations, you can still enjoy numerous pre-built automated functions that take a lot of repetitive tasks off your plate.
In terms of connecting other business tools to your contact management software, HubSpot is the clear winner with 252 one-click integrations. Some of the most popular include:
- Gmail
- Outlook
- Facebook Messenger
- Multiple calendars
- Dozens of payment gateways
- SMS tools
- Slack
- Zoom
So, if you want to connect all of your tools and access the most robust feature set without paying a penny, HubSpot’s free CRM is definitely the way to go.
If you need more functionality or ever need to upgrade later on, pricing starts at $68 per user per month. Even if you upgrade, you can still have as many users on the free plan as you’d like, so you don’t have to upgrade everyone across your entire business.
However, the biggest drawbacks are the confusing pricing packages, usage limits that widely vary from one plan to the next, and features that bleed from one hub into another. It’s not straightforward whatsoever.
But it doesn’t affect the free plan, so you don’t need to worry about it now. Just keep it in mind if you decide to upgrade later.
Really Simple Systems
What We Like
- Offers free plan for up to two users
- Provides 360-degree view of customer interactions
- Free CRM support with all plans
What’s Missing
- No mobile apps
- Limited customization and reporting tools
- Offers only a few third-party app integrations
Really Simple Systems Pricing at a Glance*
- Free: Supports two users
- Starter: $14 per user, per month
- Professional: $30 per user, per month
- Enterprise: $46 per user, per month
- Free trial of Professional plan: 14 days
Add-on Features:
- Simple Marketing: $22 per month**
- Advanced Marketing: $46 per month
- Service Desk: $46 per month**
*Based on annual billing. Monthly subscriptions are also available at slightly higher rates.
**Either Simple Marketing or Service Desk can be included for free with five or more users on the Enterprise plan. Both tools can be included for free with 10 or more users.
Really Simple Systems is an integrated CRM that allows users to access sales, marketing, and marketing data and tools at any point in the customer lifecycle. It enables multiple teams to manage their contacts, activities, marketing campaigns, and sales opportunities in a single platform. This software truly lives up to its name with its ease of use and short learning curve.
Unlike the rest of the CRM providers in this article that have mobile apps, Really Simple Systems can only be accessed on mobile via browser. It also does not have Zoho CRM’s wide customization capabilities. However, its excellent centralized platform makes it a great choice for cross-team data access within a single company.
Really Simple Systems Features
Really Simple Systems’ contact management system (Source: Really Simple Systems)
- Simple to set up and use
- Sales module includes contact management, pipeline management, quotes, opportunity history, sales forecast, activity management, calendar, geolocation, and email integration
- Marketing module includes lead management, campaign management, email marketing, marketing automation, lists and segmentation, analytics, and web forms
- Service desk module features case management, service level agreements (SLAs), and case reports
- Mobile-optimized, cloud-based CRM
- Self-help resources include an online customer portal, video tutorials, live webinars, and blogs
- Customer support is available during business hours U.K. time via phone (for Professional and Enterprise tiers only), email, and live chat
Bigin
Get started in 30 minutes or less, with Bigin contact management software.
Bigin is refreshingly simple. With it, you can keep track of all of your contacts and the most important information about them at a glance—all from within a single minimalist dashboard.
As such, all of the info you need is always at your fingertips. And you won’t feel overwhelmed with a wealth of features you’re never going to use.
It’s built specifically for small businesses looking for a lightweight CRM, so you can enjoy a simple, straightforward interface that comes with everything you need (and nothing you don’t) at a budget-friendly price point.
But don’t let its minimal UI or lack of fancy features fool you.
Bigin is definitely a force to be reckoned with when it comes to gathering leads, improving customer relationships, and closing more deals.
To start, you can use the drag-and-drop form builder to create embeddable forms with custom fields so you can start collecting the info you care about from day one.
From there, you can build fully customizable pipelines to track each contact as they move through your business. On the paid plan, you can have as many pipelines as you need and use them however you’d like.
Bigin’s pipelines are all fully customizable and you can add as many stages as you need. Plus, they’re 100% drag-and-drop, which makes it easy to move contacts from one stage to the next (or you can set up an automation to do it for you).
You can even @mention your teammates and assign tasks when you’re ready to pass a contact from one function to the next—from marketing to sales, for example.
Users can filter and view pipelines, contacts, and tasks however they’d like to so they always have eyes on the most important details without digging around for hours trying to find what they’re looking for.
Having this level of visibility lets you identify weaknesses and bottlenecks in your process so you can improve those areas, make better decisions, and analyze your performance.
While Bigin markets itself as a tool for sales, its interface is versatile enough to work for other things, such as marketing, hiring, supplier onboarding, customer service, and operations. So, you can use it to streamline dozens of processes to make the most of your new software.
It also comes with a workflow builder that makes it easier than ever to automate repetitive tasks.
If you understand basic logic, you can easily set up customized workflows using a three-step setup with a trigger, a condition, and a desired action.
Need to send an automated welcome email after someone fills out a form on your site? Want to set up an automated reminder to follow up with someone if they opened your email and didn’t reply within five days? Maybe you want to automatically move a contact from one phase of your pipeline to the next. All it takes is a few clicks.
The software also lets you set up products and packages so you can associate contacts with the products they’ve bought from you.
Bigin’s Signals feature sends automatic notifications if you miss a call, someone opens your email, a contact publishes a new tweet, or you get a new email so you can capitalize on opportunities at just the right moment.
On top of that, built-in telephony features let you buy phone numbers, make calls, and attach recordings or logs to your contact records without ever leaving the platform.
You can even view all of your interactions in a timeline view, complete with calls, emails, tweets, and purchases for complete context into every contact on your list.
If you’d like to connect all of your business tools and extend the functionality of Bigin, there are seven pre-built integrations with other Zoho apps and third-party tools like Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Mailchimp, and Zapier.
You can also integrate with more than 50 VoIP and telephony providers with no additional hardware or know-how required to set them up.
While the one-click integrations are limited, there are dozens of pre-built Zaps that make it easier than ever to connect everything via Zapier if you’re not sure how to use it.
There are two pricing plans to choose from, including:
- Free – one user, 500 contacts, one pipeline, and three workflows
- Express – $7 per user per month for up to 50,000 contacts, multiple pipelines, and 25 workflows
Conclusion:
If you own a small business, your biggest goal is to make sure that you stay in contact with your clients and customers while they’re searching for businesses like yours. Without staying in touch, you could lose potential customers to other small businesses.