Best CRM Tools for Small Businesses: 6 of Our Favorites

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Customer relationship management is how businesses can interact better with their customers to keep them returning. A reliable CRM tool is essential for business expansion. Here are our top six picks for small businesses below.

What is CRM?

CRM stands for customer relationship management. Any process, tool, or strategy helps businesses access and organize customer data better. CRM is often an online tool that allows business owners to manage customer interactions.

Features of CRM tools can range from managing a company’s website to tracking emails, customer data, and telephone calls. CRM solutions can streamline contact management, marketing automation, and general business processes. In the modern era, many companies view social media and email integration as valuable marketing tools, and a proper CRM tool can help close deals through those channels.

The primary purpose of CRM is to build and foster meaningful relationships with customers to keep them coming back. In turn, the company will benefit from increased revenue and growth. So, in other words, to successfully compete in any industry, you will need reliable CRM software.

Top 6 CRM tools for small businesses:

HubSpot

Learn MoreOn HubSpot’s Website

Overview

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HubSpot CRM has earned its spot as the number one CRM tool for its free option. This free plan has no time limit and allows business owners to manage one million contacts through marketing, sales, and customer service workflows.

If you want to go beyond the free version, a paid version starts at $45 per month and is billed annually. With the paid version, you can access inbound and outbound marketing consulting, which can take your business to the next level. Your consultant will guide you through strategies to grow your business organically.

HubSpot can enhance the customer experience your company provides. For example, you can generate email templates that increase the personalization of your email marketing campaigns. Their workflow automation tools help reduce your time on repetitive tasks, freeing team members to focus on more important matters.

This software easily integrates with platforms such as WordPress, Gmail, Outlook, AgencyAnalytics, and Zoom. You will receive daily reports on productivity, individual performance, and sales activity when you are an active user.

If you are looking for a reliable and customizable CRM tool, you cannot go wrong with HubSpot.

Salesforce

Learn MoreOn Salesforce’s Website

Overview

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Sal e sforce is known to bring many of your business needs together with its off-the-charts CRM tools. It integrates seamlessly with almost any other system, such as IT, sales, customer support, and marketing, which allows you and your employees to use your old and familiar methods while integrating Salesforce to share data between the two.

Although it is geared toward small businesses, Salesforce can also cater to mid-size and large companies. Its cloud-based platform and mobile app are ideal for business owners and employees who are on the go and want to access their software from anywhere and at any time.

One of the downsides of this CRM software tool is that each add-on carries a price tag, so your costs can quickly run up. Other than that, Salesforce is a solid sales cloud option for many business needs.

Zoho CRM

Learn MoreOn Zoho’s Website

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Zoho CRM is a prevalent platform that specializes in all things business. Zoho CRM is only one of their platforms and can easily integrate with other Zoho products for maximum business productivity.

With Zoho CRM, you can automate workflows, processes, campaigns, and customer journeys. You can focus more time and energy on personal customer relations and utilize their dedicated programs for migration, deployment, and training.

You can easily customize and manage Zoho CRM with its dedicated admin panel and developer platform. It easily integrates with 500+ third-party apps. Zoho is known for its modern interface and refreshing appeal. Zoho CRM has proven to be one of the best in the industry. Take a look and see how it fits your needs.

Freshworks

Learn MoreOn Freshwork’s Website

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Freshworks’ CRM platform, Freshsales, is mainly geared toward solo business owners who want all their tools in one place, saving time and effort. It is a cloud-based software that provides easy access to your information anytime.

Uniquely, Freshworks uses an AI knowledge base that predicts your needs with intelligent analysis, offering sales forecasts and other sales management tools. It collaborates efficiently with other platforms such as HubSpot, Meta, Klenty, and Calendly. It also has its own Freshworks academy, where you can become certified through training and blogs.

Pricing options are cost-effective for small-business owners, starting at $15 per month, which is a steal for this all-in-one-platform.

Pipedrive

Learn MoreOn Pipedrive’s Website

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Pipedrive offers advanced CRM capabilities for small business owners at a low cost. With unique pipeline management features, like email tracking, rich reporting, and lead following, Pipedrive gives you a significant bang for your buck.

This platform focuses on controlling the sales process, which empowers you to scale your business as you grow. It contains an activity-based methodology that tracks sales and makes lead follow-ups easier.

This CRM is geared toward smaller businesses because it is a beginner CRM. Pipedrive is a good option for your business if you want sales-driven CRM software.

Monday Sales CRM

Learn MoreOn Monday’s Website

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Monday Sales CRM is a flexible software that is made for small businesses. It is a good option for startups who want to grow their business and like software that can quickly get up and running within a few minutes.

With this CRM platform, you can access tools to enhance your sales pipeline, contact lists, lead management, lead captures, customer projects, marketing activities, customer onboarding, team tasks, and projects.

It is highly customizable to fit your sales cycles and automatically logs emails, leads, and communications between customers. Through automation, you can focus more time on more important matters and let this CRM software do its job.

What are some benefits of CRM tools?

A good CRM software can help businesses organize and centralize their customer data, allowing easier customer support access. Most companies seek CRM tools to optimize their sales and marketing and improve customer retention. While there are free CRM solutions, the most valuable software often comes with a price.

Data analytics can be considered one of the features of CRM because businesses can track the progress of specific projects and campaigns, identify trends and create visually intuitive dashboards to display the data.

Sales teams can benefit from the project management tools specific CRM systems provide, which aid in new lead scoring and finding potential customers, monitoring marketing efforts’ profitability, and upselling efforts at different stages of consumer life cycles.

Reliable CRM software allows customers to enjoy having better service and are likely to make multiple purchases as a result. If customers have complaints, the CRM service will document them for easy reference in the future.

Having the right CRM software can help your business scale faster, create returning customers, and provide daily business reports to grow your business. Some tools also help with task management and data entry, which can be valuable to your team.

It isn’t just your marketing department, as sales reps will value the precise analytics, and web designers will have more to go off of when creating your landing pages.

What are some different types of CRM technology?

CRM Software: CRM software compiles a business’s customer information into one place so the company can easily access data such as contact data, purchase history, and any communications between customers and employees. This helps all employees interact with customers, anticipate customer needs and track sales goals. The purpose of CRM software is to make communication between employees and clients more efficient and productive.
CRM Cloud Solutions: Cloud-based systems can provide real-time data to sales agents anywhere and almost any time as long as they are connected to the internet with a phone, computer, laptop, or tablet. These systems have heightened accessibility to customer information and eliminate having to install complicated CRM products or software.
CRM Human Management and Artificial Intelligence: Despite the need for human labor, industry analysts have discussed implementing artificial intelligence applications into CRM tools shortly. With the use of robots, CRM can be considered more efficient in repetitive and programmable tasks, which would speed up sales cycles, optimize pricing because the cost of phone calls will decrease, increase resolution rates and reduce fraud.

The bottom line.

Happy customers mean happy business owners. Knowing your business needs can make choosing the best CRM software easier. An effective CRM tool allows automation to handle the heavy work while you focus on building customer relationships.

For more information on small business tools, visit us at Entrepreneur.com.