Chandramita Bora
Customer relationship management (CRM) is crucial for running both small and large businesses. Though CRM software has been around for a while, it has assumed greater significance in recent times with the development of the cloud technology.
CRM software can play a huge role in increasing sales. It can help businesses make better decisions and increase the efficiency and productivity of their salesforce.
However, small businesses have some special requirements that need to be kept in mind while choosing a CRM software. To get the best out of the CRM technology, it is vital to select the right CRM software that can meet your business needs. Here are the top 10 CRM software for small businesses.
CRM Software for Small Businesses
Zoho CRM
Zoho CRM is one of the best options available for small and medium-sized enterprises, as their tools are user-friendly and are specifically designed keeping in mind the business needs of small enterprises.
Sales and marketing automation, product configuration, reporting, and customer analytics are some of the tools of Zoho CRM that can enhance customer retention and reduce sales and marketing costs. These tools can help you analyze customer data, access customer interaction, track leads, and provide quality customer care services.
Further, you can also link Zoho CRM with your social media contacts from Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. It can be easily integrated with iPad or iPhone, Blackberry, or Android devices. The gamification feature of the CRM makes the sales process more engaging by rewarding the salesperson achieving their targets.
Salesforce
It is a leading CRM platform for businesses of all sizes. In fact, it is the largest CRM provider in the world. It offers flexible and fully customizable cloud-based applications for sales, marketing, and customer support for both B2B and B2C business models. Salesforce CRM can also be integrated with social media.
Salesforce CRM software is easy to use. The interface is simple and user-friendly and can be easily navigated from both mobile and desktops. But its solutions are available only for SAAS (software as a service) deployment in the cloud.
The subscription fee of Salesforce CRM is a bit expensive for small entrepreneurs. Small entrepreneurs can, therefore, opt for the Salesforce’s small business edition to avail the quality service of Salesforce to manage their contacts, tasks, events, and also track their sales deals and leads.
Pipedrive
Pipedrive is a leading CRM software and a sales pipeline management system. It is a user-friendly and affordable platform for developing businesses. It can be easily integrated with Dropbox, Zapier, MailChimp, RightSignature, Zoho CRM, Google Contacts, Google Calendar, as well as other Google apps.
With Pipedrive, you can manage your sales pipeline more efficiently as it can help you identify the important leads and deals in a better way. Pipedrive CRM is available in 13 different languages. It also provides full customization, email integration, sales reporting, and email tracking.
HubSpot
Hubspot is a premier Google partner. Its cloud-based CRM platform is suitable for businesses of all sizes. Any B2B and B2C businesses including those in the accounting, real estate, and retail sectors can benefit by using the Hubspot CRM. It is especially suitable for startup ventures.
It enables users to monitor customer interactions through phone calls, emails, and social media, and also store and schedule all interactions as per leads. It can help you monitor the performance of emails, create email templates, track documents, and track and organize contacts. It can be easily integrated with other software.
FreeAgent CRM
FreeAgent CRM can import contacts from anywhere, keep them updated, give better insights into your sales pipeline, and help you monitor the performance of your salesforce. FreeAgent CRM also allows users to capture and manage leads. You can schedule the leads for follow-ups as well.
Its cloud-based CRM is specifically designed to meet the needs of the small and medium enterprises. As FreeAgent CRM contains support for Zapier, it can be integrated into any system. Other attractive features include email marketing, document storage, lead scoring, internal chat integration, customizable sales stages, and marketing automation integration.
Insightly
Insightly is the CRM solution with a user-friendly, easily navigable interface. It is tailored to integrate with a number of applications like Google Apps, Gmail, Dropbox, Google Drive, MailChimp, Evernote, QuickBooks Online, and Google calendar.
Insightly allows users to manage the different stages of projects, and track contacts, tasks, sales, and documents. It saves emails directly from Gmail. As of now, Insightly offers five plans – free, basic, plus, professional, and enterprise.
Suite CRM
It offers an open and free CRM platform equipped with tools and functionalities that enable you to build business process models and sales pipeline models, and also monitor leads.
With Suite CRM’s self-service portals, your service team will get instant notifications, whenever a support request is made. So, this will enable you to provide quality and interactive support to your customers. Template quotations, pricing strategy control, and contract renewal servicing are some other important services offered by this CRM platform.
Sugar CRM
Besides organizing leads and customers, Sugar CRM provides a set of campaign management and reporting tools. It is considered one of the best options for small and startup businesses, especially the tech-savvy ones.
Sugar CRM is customizable and its interface is well-designed and easy to navigate. It has a highly active online development community, which can be of immense help for startups for support and guidance.
Sugar CRM is known for its excellent customer support service. Its dashboard helps monitor marketing and sales along with customer support. It also offers services for sales automation and forecasting, support automation, marketing lead management, call center automation, product level quotes, and third-party integration.
Nimble
Nimble is a cloud-based CRM platform that can not only import contact information from Gmail, Facebook, LinkedIn, Skype, emails, and phones, but can also keep your data well-organized. By enhancing your contact record with data from social media, it can give you deeper insights.
For small and startup businesses, Nimble is one of the best budget-friendly options out there. You can integrate this CRM with different applications and thus connect all business processes for better efficiency and coordination.
Nimble also offers sales and marketing automation, social listening and engagement, people and company business intelligence, and sales pipeline tracking.
Apptivo
With powerful features like lead management, campaign management, flexible workflow tools, marketing automation, and integrated quoting, Apptivo CRM can give your business the edge over your competitors.
It is a cloud-based CRM known for its excellent customer service. It is not only easy to use but also cost-effective, which make it a good option for small businesses.
So, these are some of the best CRM software options available for small businesses. Each business has some specific requirements, and so, there cannot be a one-size-fits-all CRM software for all types of small businesses. Therefore, it is important to prioritize your needs before choosing the right CRM platform for your business.
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