Best CRM Software for Small Businesses

What is CRM Software?

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management and refers to a software system, or service, that is used to build and manage customer relationships for your business. CRM software will manage all of your interactions with your potential customers or sales leads, and your existing customers. You record all of your customer details, and preferences, and interactions that you have, or need to have, for each of your clients or customers. It’s like keeping a file for each of your customers, where you can quickly catch up on those important details for each customer so you can have a great conversation and possibly gain another sale or deal. The goal of a CRM software is to help you give your customers a more engaging experience, increase customer retention, and drive more sales and deals to grow your business. When you make the decision to buy a new CRM system, or to upgrade your old one, it can be a difficult task to figure out where to even begin. We created this guide on the top names in customer relationship management systems to help you to narrow down which one would be the best one for you and your business.

Best CRM Software

• Salesforce • Pipedrive • monday Sales CRM • Oracle NetSuite CRM • Freshsales CRM • Zoho CRM • Keap • SugarCRM • Insightly • Zendesk

About CRM Software

Businesses use CRM software in order to engage and build connections with their potential customers, leads, as well as current customers, and clients. The software can be installed or hosted on your own system or servers, or it can be hosted in the cloud, depending on which works best for you and your business.

How to Choose the Best CRM Software

There are a few things to keep in mind when deciding on which CRM software is best for you and your business. The most importnt being cost, built in features, ease of setup, and integrations with other tools and software.

Salesforce CRM Software

Salesforce CRM is one of the largest CRM products and customizable solutions to fit any business in any industry. Larger businesses and corporations prefer salesforce because of the latest modern sales features that let you leverage the power of social media engagement to gain leads and drive sales. You can get started for as little as $25 per month. This is a cloud based service that is simple to setup and get started in minutes. Salesforce CRM Monthly Cost: $25 to $1250 Salesforce is an industry leader and is a popular platform that’s perfect for small and large businesses. For more advanced users as they increase their knowledge about the platform and it’s many integrations to dive more deeply into the CRM capabilities, Salesforce offers a wide variety of customizable solutions for sales, marketing and customer service teams to continuously mature their organizations. The dashboard is simple to use, and easy to customize for your specific needs. Advanced features like forecasting and AI-powered assistants can be added to the business packages as your company and customer requirements mature over time. The Salesforce CRM Essentials plan, which is perfect for most small businesses, is only $25 per user per month, for up to 10 users. With this plan you get access to great features like lead management, web to lead capture, mass email, campaign management, case management, and email templates. For an upgraded cost of $75 per user per month, The Professional Plan features custom applications and collaborative forecasting.

PipeDrive CRM Software

Pipedrive CRM software is quick and easy to set up and use. It is the perfect solution for small businesses that need a powerful CRM tool with an excellent visual sales pipeline data visualizations. Their visual tools make easy to quickly see where you need to focus in on for great opportunities to bring in more clients and sales. Their included mobile app helps you to engage with your customers and team members when you are out on the road or away from the office. pipedrive CRM Monthly Cost: $15 to $99

monday Sales CRM

Monday Sales CRM solution offers solutions for project management with key time saving and organizational capabilities. The easy to use interfaces get you up and running very quickly, even if this is your first experience with a CRM software.

Example Screenshot of Monday Sales CRM Software

All plans include unlimited boards to organize your projects and your contacts. Monday Sales CRM has simple trigger and action templates so you can easily build timesaving automations to increase your productivity and drive successful sales opportunities. monday Sales CRM Monthly Cost: $10 to $24+

Oracle NetSuite CRM Software

With Oracle NetSuite CRM Software you will be able to see a single view of your prospects, customers, clients, partners, and vendors to give your sales, marketing and support teams the live an up to date data they need to deliver individualized customer experiences that will help to drive more sales, and close more deals. Netsuite is one of the top all in one commerce suite solutions for marketing, sales, and operations. It is highly cutomizable to give you exactly what you need to be successful in your type of business. This is for those small businesses that have owners or employees that don’t mind digging into the technical side of things to develop and tie in the full solution to take full advantage. It’s also not cheap, though the pricing is not listed, it runs into the thousands. This is a cloud based solution that is more geared towards companies that have the staff that can invest a bit of time to get it all setup and configured to your liking. The Netsuite dashboard gives you a full view of your customer data, and what’s being accomplished across your customer facing teams. It’s a powerhorse, that will give you some amazing visibility. The price is worth it if you have the resources to stand it up and maintain it, and you have large sales to give you a good return on your investment (ROI). Oracle NetSuite CRM Monthly Cost: Not Published, into the $1000’s

Freshsales CRM Software

The Freshsales CRM Software platform enables you to run email campaigns to your clients, customers, and potential clients. It is easy to use, easy to configure, and doesn’t take long to set it up and hit the ground running. It helps you better understand what your clients and customers needs are for targeted communications to drive more sales. Freshsales works with their Freshchat AI driven bot-assisted messaging tool to help with your customer service responses. If the bot cannot answer the question, it will then direct the customer to your customer service agents for the more complicated issues. FreshSales CRM Monthly Cost: $15 to $83

Zoho CRM Software

Zoho CRM Software enables your business to increase leads, accelerate sales and accurately measure performance with simple workflows and dashboards. The AI powered assistant will predict leads, and deal prospects by identifying potential customers for sales conversions. You can quickly and easily build a custom platform to drive more sales. The pricing models are quite simple with Standard, Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate options available, so you can choose the right plan for you. Most businesses choose the Enterprise plan, which runs $40 per month per user. Zoho CRM Monthly Cost: $14 to $52

Keap CRM Software

Keap CRM Software helps you to collect more leads, maintain information about the communications you have with your leads to help you convert them into clients and potential sales with their powerful CRM for small business and sales and marketing automation. Keap CRM Monthly Cost: $149 to $199

SugarCRM Service

SugarCRM Software connects your sales teams, marketing teams, and service teams by letting the platform do the work so that they can focus on other tasks like boosting productivity, growing the business and engaging customers. Sugar CRM Monthly Cost: $49 to $1000+

Insightly CRM Software

Insightly CRM Software helps you to build and improve your sales pipeline to grow your business and increase your sales. Insightly CRM Monthly Cost: $29 to $99

Zendesk CRM Software

Zendesk CRM Software makes customer service better for your business, which helps to imrove customer relationships, and improve customer loyalty and increase sales. Zendesk builds software to help you meet your customers needs, set your team up for higher success, and keep your business in sync. Zendesk CRM Monthly Cost: $19 to $99

Typical CRM Software Costs

Most CRM software is priced on a monthly basis, and there is typically a cost for each user for each month. You can save money on some of them buy paying for the year at once where you will get a discount from some of the companies. You can expect to pay about $15 to $25 per month for the basics, that are really geared to small businesses like individual real estate agents, or service type businesses. These basic versions are more simple to use, don’t have a real learning curve, and can be setup in minutes. This is a great way to track your potential client interactions, and plan for what to say on your next communication, and when you should make contact again. Stepping up a level, to the $30 to $45 per month range gives you some more advanced features, and potential for more advanced integrations for small to mid sized businesses. These advanced features will have a little bit of a learning curve, and will take a little longer to setup. The next level in the $50 to $75 per month range is more for larger businesses that have a dedicated team to do the setup and manage the more complex integrations. The higer tier, going up over $150 per month into the thousands is for large enterprises. There will be extensive training needed, from a team of individuals that can be dedicated to building and maintaining the solution and reporting.

CRM Software Advanced Features

CRM solutions have easy to use simple features for those businesses that really want to just use it for customer contact and lead tracking. Very simple to use for that, and as you mature your business you may want to look into the more advanced features if your plan comes with them, or you may want to upgrade over time to be able to use them.

CRM Software Workflow Automation

Configuring the workflow automation properly will save you time, and give customers the quick response they are hoping for. As an example of a workflow automation you could have the software automatically send a message to one of your sales reps when a customer fills out a form on your website.

CRM Software Reporting

CRM software custom reports will break down your sales and marketing data to help you analyze your leads, and your client and customer purchasing behaviors, to give you more ways to view the data to see opportunities for increased sales.

Third Party CRM Software Integrations

Third-party CRM integrations gives you a wide range of tools to connect your CRM software to give you even more return on your investment by increasing your sales opportunities, or streamlining your operations, marketing, and sales teams. If you thought of a need, someone else probably has to, so there is probbly a tool for that.

How to Choose the Right CRM Software for Your Business

Set A Budget

CRM application costs for the basic packages are very cheap, and this may be a good place to start in order to see if you gain any benefit from a CRM app. By setting a budget, you should stick to it, and find an app that has a package in your price range.

Decide What Features You Need

The different price points are for packages that have certain features. Deciding what features you need is a good way to help you figure out which package level you would need to buy.

Ask Other Companies Which Tool They Like

There is no better way to help narrow the field of which CRM software would be best for your type of business is by asking your friends and partners that have similar businesses that run a CRM solution. The best advice you can receive is from people that are using a product, or have used multiple products, doing what you do. They can also tell you how helpful it was to them, and how it impacted their customer relationships and sales.

Try Some Free Trial Versions

It is also nice to get your hands on a trial version to tinker around with and see which interfaces you like, which ones have the best reports that are useful to your business. Most companies offer a limited trial version.

Buy Your CRM Software

Now that you have learned what you needed to on the various CRM platforms that are available, you have made your decision, and you can buy the software. After you buy it, the fun begins and you can start setting it up exactly the way you want it. It’s fun to have a new tool that fills a need that you have probably had for a very long time trying to manage all of these lead contacts, and customer contacts, the old fashioned way with a spreadsheet or a simple database. You will be amazed at what you can do, and the new level of visibility you will have for your business. Your customers will appreciate it to, with communications with great outcomes of exactly what they were looking for, and needing. It’s a win for everyone.

Advantages That A CRM Software Will Provide

A CRM solution will give you a centralized location where you and your employees can log all of the communications and details you have with your potential customers and sales leads, as well as your current customers and clients. It will give you ap lace to maintain you customer information, and what you talked about. It will. It can do sales forecasting, remind you of communications you need to have with each of your customers, or leads. CRM software can also give you visibility into potential sales or upsale opportunities, depending on the package and vendor you buy from. It will help you and your team build stronger customer and lead releationships by using the data you have populated in your CRM for each contact you have had with them. This also helps to retain customers with the communications being more tailored to what your past conversations have been about, and what types of things your customers and leads need.

Frequently Asked Questions About CRM Software - FAQ

What Does CRM Software Do?

CRM software helps your business log communications you have with your customers, and potential sales leads. Some version let you build marketing campaigns to drive more sales as well. The software helps you to build and maintain better relationships with your customers and leads.

Is Free CRM Software Any Good?

Yes, it can be. Atleast to start with, to get your feet wet in learning how CRM sofware works, and this will also let you figure out if it’s something you really need. If you are making calls to potential leads each week, or to your customers to drive more sales, it is absolutely worth it and a free version will get you started. However, the features in the free version is rather limited, which may or may not work for you in the long term, but it will work for you to give it a try either way.

What Are the Disadvantages of Using CRM software?

The only real disadvantage of using a CRM software is that it’s another piece of software for you to learn. Most of the basic plans are fairly simple and not a big deal to get started with. But, some of the top tier plans will require you to have some employees that can take on the work of building it out and managing it which may add some additional costs to your business.

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