When deciding on the best CRM for your company, you must evaluate a number of aspects, including the business and if it has all of the features and capabilities that your organization need. We examined and analyzed more than 60 systems to identify which ones we believe are best for varied business needs because there are so many options on the market. We chose our top selections after considering a variety of variables, such as how much each CRM costs, how easy it is to use, and how effectively it interfaces with other popular business programmes. Continue reading to learn more about our suggestions, as well as crucial factors to consider while selecting CRM software.
Which CRM software are some examples?
Customer relationship management (CRM) software is any technological system that assists businesses in managing communications with present and prospective customers. CRM software market leaders include Salesforce, Zoho, and HubSpot.
13 Best CRM Software For Small Business In 2021
1. Salesforce
Salesforce is a well-known name in the CRM industry, and for good reason. It’s the go-to solution for small businesses who expect to expand and require a CRM that can keep up. Salesforce is filled with features, yet its user-friendly interface makes it simple to use regardless of technical ability. Account and lead management capabilities that track deals from lead to completion are appreciated by very small teams and solo business owners, as is the built-in email integration with Gmail and Outlook. Customizable reports and dashboards update in real time to ensure sales professionals always have the most up-to-date information, and case management routing allows team members to move or escalate issues to other groups for quick resolution.
Upgrade plans for greater functionality, such as automatic lead scoring and collaborative forecasting for cross-team strategizing, as your business expands. Tools for creating product catalogues, estimates, contracts, and sales orders allow for easy expansion of a customer base or product range.
All Salesforce service plans provide access to a user-based customer support community for crowdsourced troubleshooting and issue resolution, as well as an extensive collection of training resources. As specialized tools like real-time Facebook Messenger chat allow you to create a tailored Salesforce experience, more help and guidance are accessible as an add-on component.
2. Zoho
Zoho CRM is an excellent alternative for remote teams and sales professionals that spend a significant amount of time on the road. Its iPhone and Android mobile apps provide many of the same features as the desktop version and update in real time, ensuring that the most recent customer data is always available.
The Zoho CRM mobile app allows you to access and change your CRM data when offline, removing the need for you and your sales force to rely on Wi-Fi or your cell provider’s data plan. Calls, customer visits, and other actions can be logged directly in the app, and voice notes and files can be attached for easy retrieval and reference. A worldwide search tool assists you in swiftly finding information, while integration with your phone’s caller ID and voice-activated assistant allows you to access your phone’s native features for added functionality.
You may also use the mobile app to plan your day, set reminders, schedule activities, send an email, or make the most of your unexpected leisure by integrating a map that displays your local leads and prospects. Collaborate with your team members with simple feeds that accept comments and mentions, ensuring that you’re never out of touch. The mobile app also contains Zia, Zoho CRM’s AI tool, which you can use to create new customer records, add comments to existing records, update the status of a deal, or start phone calls.
3. HubSpot
Customer relationship management software is fantastic for collecting a plethora of sales data, but its true value resides in how businesses can use the data to improve sales force performance and strategize business decisions. HubSpot is a CRM for small businesses who desire the best reporting tools and performance insights. Its unlimited package contains over 90 report templates that you can choose and arrange on customizable dashboards.
Deal projections, sales-funnel data, and sales-activity insights on team productivity and individual sales agents’ success are among the most popular reports. HubSpot also generates reports on team inbox chat and email interactions to provide information on response times, how long it takes to resolve a message, and how well messages are dispersed across team members. HubSpot’s paid CRM system includes a bespoke report builder, allowing you to get the precise analytics you require. Custom filters further refine report results for more in-depth data on everything from your website traffic to individual sales.
Many small businesses find HubSpot’s free plan sufficient, although the basic premium package is also worth considering. It includes some popular CRM features, such as a meeting scheduler and basic automation capabilities. This plan restricts full access to two users while allowing an infinite number of free users to perform administrative activities and view reports.
4. Zendesk
Sales tactics work best when everyone is on the same page, and Zendesk Sell is the ideal solution for maximizing cross-departmental communication. If your customer experience plan goes beyond the sales team, you’ll need a CRM solution that can handle the workload. Zendesk Sell, which is widely used across sales, marketing, and support teams, centralizes data from many customer touchpoints to eliminate duplication of effort or embarrassing miscommunications.
The entry-level plan from Zendesk Sell is ideal for very small businesses and lone entrepreneurs. It comes with standard CRM capabilities such as a configurable sales pipeline, basic reports, and a team document repository. As an administrator, you can assign specific team members to pipeline deals, which alert personnel outside the sales team to any modifications or action items.
Meanwhile, smart lists can assist your sales teams in segmenting and filtering leads, while email-tracking solutions allow your marketing team to track customer involvement. Native integration with Zendesk Support keeps your support team updated throughout the customer journey.
Zendesk Sell’s higher-level plans offer much more, including increased document storage space, sales forecasting, and comprehensive call analytics. Bulk emailing and infinite email templates assist in the creation of successful marketing emails, and role-based permissions provide you and your other admins with granular control over who can access data within the CRM.
5. Monday.com
Small business owners understand that having a firm road map is the best way to achieve their objectives. Monday.com’s combination of project management and CRM solutions keeps you on schedule so you can concentrate on your customers rather than your software. Its interface is similar to that of a spreadsheet, but it offers significantly more capabilities. You can use custom dashboards to keep the information you need most at your fingertips, or you can perform a deep dive into your workload with eight data visualization options, including Gantt charts and Kanban boards.
The software quickly adapts to multiple project techniques, such as sprints, Agile, and Waterfall planning, while adapting existing workflows. Monday.com monitors workloads in real time, so you always know where to direct resources before something falls between the gaps.
Monday.com’s project management tools complement its customer relationship management capabilities, which include lead collecting and monitoring, marketing outreach, and sales pipeline management. You can create your own workflows and processes from scratch, or you can use its CRM and sales templates to get started in minutes. Monday.com is a low-cost way for small business owners to manage customer information and team workflows on a single, simple platform.
6. Pipedrive
All CRMs collect lead and sales information, but Pipedrive’s distinct visual sales funnel distinguishes it from competitors. You receive a clear picture of each deal’s current stage and can use the drag-and-drop interface to accomplish mission-critical operations like adding contacts or transferring deals between stages with ease. Pipedrive even captures leads from chatbot and web form interactions and feeds them directly into the pipeline, where they will not be neglected. Customizable pipelines and fields enable you to integrate with existing workflow systems or create new ones.
Pipedrive’s capabilities, such as reporting tools, process automation, and communication tracking, are intended to improve sales performance. The integrated artificial intelligence technology analyses your previous business performance to identify strategies to increase your sales efforts and tasks that will provide the most benefit right now.
You can remain on top of assignments no matter where you are by using the built-in automation tool and the full-featured mobile app. Every element works in tandem with the visual pipeline to keep the customer in the spotlight from deal inception to deal conclusion and beyond. Pipedrive is relatively simple to use, but if you run into any problems, all subscription levels include 24/7 assistance via live chat and email.
7. Keap
Keap is an excellent choice for busy small business owners seeking a turnkey CRM that is simple to set up and manage. Its migration staff will assist you in free migration of your company’s existing data from many major CRMs to Keap. Its fee-based onboarding service offers one-on-one coaching as well as additional training materials to get you up and running quickly. Live chat support and a vast online library of useful information are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and phone and email assistance is available on weekdays.
Keap’s entry-level plan is intended for small and emerging businesses. It provides the essential tools that businesses require to assist their sales operations, such as lead gathering, client invoicing, and contact management tools. Meeting scheduling software makes it simple to schedule meetings, and email sync with Gmail and Outlook allows you to consolidate communications in a single, well-organized system. Keap expands with your business, so you can quickly add more CRM capabilities as needed.
Keap just added a new function to assist users contact their target customers: automated text message marketing. With this new feature, users can programme text message answers to be sent automatically when certain circumstances occur (e.g., a customer completes a web form). This functionality not only meets your consumers where they are, but it also relieves your team’s workload by streamlining your customer communication process.
8. Freshworks
Freshworks is a distinctive solution for sales people who make and receive a high volume of calls and want CRM software to collect the data generated by those calls. With a single click, you can connect your existing phone number to the CRM platform or purchase a new local or toll-free number from over 90 countries. There are also mobile and vanity phone numbers available.
Call recording, call transfer, conference calling, and a widget that allows you to make calls directly from Freshworks’ sales page are all built-in phone features. To improve the customer experience, you can establish agent extensions for quick call routing and set bespoke ringtones that callers will hear before answering the phone. Personalized welcomes and phone tree messages round out the personalization and branding possibilities that make contact with your company a pleasurable experience for your customers.
Freshworks offers a complete feature set that includes deal and account management, list segmentation, email sync, and website visitor activity tracking to assist sales calls and all other customer touchpoints. Freddy AI, its artificial intelligence platform, completes the bundle with predictive contact scoring, deal insights, and smart chatbots. Freshworks’ CRM subscriptions come in a variety of price ranges, including sales-only and marketing-only tiers, so you just pay for the capabilities you require.
9. Oracle Netsuite
Oracle Netsuite CRM is a popular choice for small e-commerce businesses looking to better understand their consumers’ buying and purchasing behaviour. It includes all of the features you’d expect from a full-featured CRM, as well as technologies that provide complete visibility into your company’s in-store, online, and call-center interactions with clients.
The expanded customer profiles in Oracle NetSuite CRM consolidate information gathered across many touchpoints, highlighting transaction history to inform and forecast future purchase behaviour. The system tracks how your clients interact with your website, including the things they put to their wish list or cart. It also keeps track of return histories, marketing campaign replies, and company communications. When you convert quotes to sales orders, the software automatically calculates tax and shipping and provides intelligent upsell recommendations at the time of purchase.
Oracle NetSuite CRM combines customer data analysis with traditional customer relationship management features including contact management, sales pipeline analytics, and customer support case management. When all of the data is combined, it offers a complete picture of your clients, from the first contact to the last sale. A built-in partner relationship management feature integrates your collaborative marketing efforts, commission distribution, and partner sales forecasts, allowing you to better evaluate the health of each partner relationship.
10. Quickbase
Despite the enormous variety of CRMs available, some small business owners find that none of them are a perfect fit. Quickbase is a downloadable customer relationship management template that may be used to create a fully integrated CRM.
Quickbase is a “low-code” solution, which means that the majority of the heavy lifting is done for you, but the completed product still takes some coding skills. Quickbase isn’t the appropriate CRM for everyone, but developers will appreciate the advantages of a low-code programme that can be ready for deployment in weeks rather than months. Because system tweaks and modifications are conducted in a sandbox environment, there is often no need to take the complete CRM system offline for updates. Some components can be replaced with no downtime.
Quickbase operates in the same way as a regular CRM once it is operational. Drag-and-drop workflow automations, file attachment space, business app connectivity, reporting, and other common CRM capabilities are all included. Each service package gives access to a library including hundreds of sample apps that are worth exploring. Quickbase might not have as many features as prebuilt systems, yet many businesses see this as an advantage. A flexible CRM allows you to integrate the features you want without paying extra for those you don’t.
11. Sage
Providing a fantastic customer experience does not end after the deal is completed. You must maintain your customer relationships and respond fast when problems arise. The customer care tools in Sage CRM can assist your workers in providing support and monitoring resolutions without leaving the CRM platform. Team collaboration capabilities provide metrics on case histories and resolution timeframes to assist you in identifying service gaps, and reporting tools allow you to build detailed visual charts and reports.
Sage CRM features a central repository for storing frequent problems and solutions. You can add solutions as you go, or you can save evaluated and preapproved solutions in the knowledge base for consistency and speedier case resolution. You can also establish a web self-service site to assist your consumers in resolving their own issues, lessening the pressure on your support crew.
A plethora of additional CRM tools assist the customer experience from the first point of contact until the sale’s conclusion. Workflow automation and lead routing guarantee that your salespeople contact with customers at the proper moment, while forecasting and reporting tools examine everything from customer behaviour to sales methods. Sage CRM also has a number of capabilities to assist you in managing multichannel marketing campaigns and supporting targeted marketing initiatives.
12. Insightly
Insightly is a CRM that uses the customer information it collects to assist small businesses develop smooth operations. Most customer relationship management systems organize data well, but Insightly enhances that data’s utility with automated tasks and processes to guarantee busy professionals don’t miss critical phases in the sales process.
Insightly’s service plans all allow you to establish rules for common occurrences that trigger the next steps in the sales process. For example, as a deal progresses from prospect to qualified lead, the system can automatically create a task reminding you to make a sales call. Its top-tier plan includes the option to build full workflows around an event, such as sending a reminder, emailing a meeting request to the lead, and adding a new record to the database all at the same time. Workflows and task automation liberate teams from time-consuming, repetitive chores, allowing them to focus on customers.
Insightly has a number of extra capabilities, including connectivity with a number of prominent business platforms, such as Slack and Microsoft 365. Automatic social profile enrichment, complete communication management, and relationship-linking capabilities all work together to generate a 360-degree perspective of your consumers, allowing you to strengthen customer relationships. Milestone and task monitoring ensures that your organization meets client expectations and that nothing slips between the cracks.
13. SugarCRM
SugarCRM is a wonderful solution for small businesses with unique demands that necessitate more customization than a typical CRM can provide. Several parts of the software, including fields, modules, and page layouts, can be updated or modified to user specifications – no coding knowledge required. You can also customize fundamental SugarCRM services like opportunity trackers, forecast builders, and job schedulers, however this may necessitate more technical knowledge.
SugarCRM’s customization features work in unison with its set core features to help your business achieve optimal efficiency. Reports and dashboards provide real-time insights into the sales pipeline, allowing you to monitor your team’s performance and make quick business choices. The technology also stores the whole history of a customer’s trip, allowing you to properly predict outcomes. SugarCRM’s user-friendly quotation management system features configurable PDF templates and supports several currencies, which is beneficial for businesses with international clients.
SugarCRM’s base tier provides the majority of the features and capabilities that a small business requires, but if you decide to upgrade, you have various options. Upper tiers contain tools required by a growing business, such as complex processes, cloud storage, unlimited emails, and increased customer support choices.
