Top 13 Best Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software for Small Businesses
The biggest challenge for small businesses (or SMBs) is growth.
And by growth, I mean more exposure, more customers and employees and definitely more revenue. And while being in the process of this growth the workflows and organizational processes need to be streamlined within your business. That’s when CRM software becomes of great value.
Last year we created an overview of the best Customer Relationship Management software for Enterprise businesses. Now we want to focus on the smaller players. This article will zoom in on 15 of the best (and top-rated) CRM software intended for small businesses.
Three Major Benefits of using CRM Software
WHAT IS A CRM SOFTWARE?
1- CRM software or Customer Relationship Management software is a tool that helps you manage customer data and offer streamlined customer services across your business.
2- Most businesses need a contact manager to handle contact details of their customers and prospects. In the early stages of most companies, this is typically done manually through spreadsheets or simple contact management tools.
3- However, these processes become inefficient as your business grows, and if you don’t fix the problem fast enough, then it can lead to significant loss in opportunity / sales.
4- A CRM software helps solve the problem by storing all aspects of customer relationship into a database and making it easily accessible. It allows your marketing, sales, and customer support teams to have all the data at their fingertips when needed.
5- CRM software are incredibly useful in increasing sales, building customer relationships, and providing amazing customer services.
6- Your customers get more personalized, more attentive, and highly efficient service.
Maybe you’re not using any CRM at the moment. Let’s take a look at the benefits first…
1. Contact organization
First and foremost are your contacts – hence the name CRM (or Customer Relationship Management). As your business’ customer base grows, you’ll want to have a system for organizing that data in a way that works to your benefit. This clean-cut overview of your contacts will also help you run sales processes more fluently.
2. Sales reporting
Helps you keep an overview of sales performance by way of various metrics such as calls made and deals booked. This is ideal for managing your pipeline.
Small business Customer Relationship Management Software helps you track and visualize sales performance metrics through customer relationship profiles.
These profiles help distinguish prospects at every stage of the funnel while building a pipeline and helping your client base grow with your business. Tracking outreach and booking progress also help your organization better manage its revenue.
3. Customer segmentation
Digital marketers and sales teams are all about some customer segmentation these days. This is not only useful for personalization efforts, but also breaking down prospects into different groups such as how big the deal is, where they’re located, and more. This gives your sales team a bit more focus.
What should your SMB look for in a CRM software?
There are a couple of facets you – as a small-business – should look out for when selecting your first CRM software:
- Low budget: Small businesses and startups are always looking for the most cost-efficient option. That is why we’ve selected all budget-friendly tools (some of which are even free!).
- Easy to learn: The learning curve is also an important factor for SMBs. Most smaller businesses don’t have the time to master a complex, enterprise-grade software. There is no IT or CRM expert needed to use the tools listed below.
- Customizable: Some tools dissect every minor interaction which can not only produce an overwhelming amount of data, but also keep you from your goal. Try a tool that has a wide range of applications but doesn’t overdo it.
- Integrates well with other tools: It’s always good to have a software that can take on all your other tools and mix data for the ultimate results.
- Customer Support: This is another big one. Because most SMBs have pretty small teams, it’s helpful to have a tool that offers sufficient support to get you up and running.
In general, small companies are latecomers to CRM, so they have the advantage of avoiding the early adopters’ mistakes….
Top CRM Software for Small Businesses
Alright, let’s get to it. Here are the top 15 Customer Relationship Management software for small businesses…
How We Evaluated Contact Management Software
The best contact management and CRM software should provide a range of tools for adding, managing, and organizing contacts. It should also include features that use this data to improve sales activities, such as interaction analytics, automated workflows triggered by contact activities, and marketing campaign management.
The criteria we used to evaluate the best contact management software includes:
- Contact lists and segmentation
- Email tracking and templates
- Mobile access
- Reporting and analytics
- Added features, such as lead and opportunity management
- Price
- Ease of use
Based on these criteria and our research, we’ve chosen this list as the best overall contact management softwares for its combination of contact management functionality and pricing options.
It also includes powerful business-to-business (B2B) sales and relationship management tools that make it a good option for sales teams that want more than basic contact management.
Metrilo
Metrilo CRM is a website plugin for managing contacts and contact interactions that take place on your website. It automatically creates a visitor’s contact profile, including robust visitor behavior analytics such as time on site and average spend.
These contact profiles can be used to create lists that are based on customer behavior, making it the best solution for ecommerce businesses and companies that track behavior on their website.
Metrilo Pricing
Essential: $119 per month; CRM tools and customer database are not available at this level
Pro: $199 per month; includes ecommerce CRM tools such as customer database and profiles
Free trial: 14 days
Metrilo Features
Supports unlimited users
Robust customer segmentation filters
Customer lifetime metrics
Marketing email automation tools
Product performance reports
Salesmate CRM
With Salesmate Customer Relationship Management you can speed up the sales processes and offer customers a personalized experience. Manage your contacts effectively and keep track of all related sales activities.
This tool is also perfect for sending out email campaigns and you’ll know what happens to your emails once you hit send. As a Small Business you appreciate flexibility and scalability and Salesmate understands these needs.
Pricing: Starts at $12/user/month.
Website: www.salesmate.io
Nimble: Best Contact Manager for Social Media Marketers
Nimble is a contact manager with many of its features built around social media, including a social prospector tool as well as social profile matching and enrichment. This includes Twitter, AngelList, Facebook, and Instagram, giving it an edge over other CRMs on our list other for social media engagement.
This feature alone makes Nimble ideal for companies that value social media in their sales processes.
Zoho
Though we previously included Zoho in our enterprise-grade software list, this software can also be employed by small businesses – thanks to the variety in editions offered. Zoho – in comparison to Insightly – offers a bit more in terms of sales/marketing features.
It offers its users website visitor tracking, lead scoring, sales signals (with pop-up notifications about leads) and more. Note: Most of the advanced features are included only in the professional and enterprise editions.
Pricing: Free version, Standard ($12/month), Professional ($20/month), Enterprise ($35/month) and more.
Website: www.zoho.com
Hubspot
HubSpot offers a completely free version of its CRM software that is rather popular among small businesses.
The software includes all of the basic features provided by CRM software, allowing you keep track of your company’s activities, including contacts and company profiles, assigning & tracking deals, and managing all of that data in a detailed dashboard (visible to all team members).
Already a HubSpot Sales user? Then you can also use this CRM software to boost your inbound sales. Not to mention, HubSpot offers several integration options with popular apps like SalesForce, Shopify and Microsoft Dynamics.
Pricing: Free of costs.
Website: www.hubspot.com
Salesforce
SalesForce is perhaps one of the biggest and most widely used CRM software on the market. Luckily for smaller business, SalesForce offers a basic edition called Lightning Essentials. This package provides the user with an advanced contact manager that includes email integration and follow-up reminders. It also includes a lot of options for integration and customisation.
Salesforce is an all-in-one, cloud-based solution that has everything you need in CRM software. Although this software is typically associated with larger businesses and enterprises, Salesforce’s small business edition lets you take advantage of the product’s robust set of CRM tools and resources at an SMB-friendly price. Part of Salesforce Small Business Solutions, the platform is very easy to use and includes key features like lead generation, contact and opportunity management, sales forecasting, and workflow automation. While small businesses can take advantage of the lower-priced tiers, the plans and features of the Salesforce system are suited for larger businesses.
February 2020: Salesforce recently acquired Evergage, a personalization and customer data platform, to strengthen its real-time personalization abilities and interactions. This move will increase Salesforce’s agility as a system and help it personalize website content based on users’ behavior within the program. The acquisition of Evergage gives Salesforce access to its technology, which also includes an advanced artificial intelligence system. This merger will allow Salesforce to better cater to users and develop predictive features that make the program easier and more comfortable to operate.
May 2020: Salesforce is adding new features to help companies get back to work once businesses reopen during the coronavirus pandemic. Its new features facilitate social distancing through Salesforce’s shift management system, which allows employers to control how many people are in the office at one time. Its emergency response management suite also helps employers keep their teams safe through contact tracing.
Pricing: Lightning Essentials package ($25/month/user), Lightning Professional ($75/month/user), and more.
Website: www.salesforce.com
Agile CRM
Agile CRM is a particularly interesting CRM software in that it offers a lot of those big business features like custom appointments, drag-and-drop marketing automation and reports via email. This software also supports widgets, a large library of plugins, API-powered integrations and more. The free version, however, is quite limited in terms of features offered.
Pricing: Free for up to 10 users, or choose the Starter package ($14.99/user/month).
Website: www.agilecrm.com
Freshsales
Freshsales enables you to automatically capture your website visitors as sales leads and group them based on their engagement with your website.
Assign them to the right salespeople on your team. Reach out to each lead with complete context and track deals by the personalized pipelines.
Pricing: Package for Growing Teams ($25,- /user/month).
Website: www.freshworks.com
Capsule CRM
Capsule CRM is a software that’s been around for quite a while now. Starting up in 2008, it has become quite popular in recent years. It is a very easy-to-use software that allows its users to track both relationships and sales pipelines. Straight and to the point.
Not to mention it can be used on both desktops and mobile. The user interface is broken down into five groups: dashboard, people and organisations, sales pipeline, calendars and tasks and lastly, cases.
One pitfall, however, is that it offers less functionality in terms of campaigns and reporting.
Pricing: They have both a free package (up to 2 users) and a Professional package (£12/user/month).
Website: www.capsulecrm.com
Microsoft Dynamics 365
If you are a Microsoft user you’ll probaly know that Microsoft Dynamics 365 is an all-in-one platform for sales and marketing. This CRM is more than your average CRM. AI Of course this platform can be extended with other Microsoft products.
Pricing: Different modules and licensens offered. Sales Insight i.e. (€ 42,20/user/month)
Website: Dynamics.microsoft.com
Less Annoying CRM
With just one subscription plan costing $10 per user per month, Less Annoying CRM takes the complexity and expense out of adopting a customer relationship management solution. Less Annoying CRM doesn’t have all the features competing CRMs have, but it simplifies the implementation process: You can expect to have the system up and running in hours. Anyone interested in Less Annoying CRM can check out a software demo and screenshots online without filling out a form or submitting a request.
It’s an approachable small business tool that can handle all of your needs from a sales and CRM standpoint, plus it’s easy to implement, whether you have experience using CRM solutions or not.
Base CRM
Base is a CRM software that is ideal for companies looking to customise their sales pipelines. Users can make use of a sales tracking solution that lets you customise sales stages. You can add things like leads, collaborators and records to all your sales deals in the Sales Pipeline section.
Base also offers real-time visual reporting via templates as well as integrations with social networks and other third party apps such as Zapier, MailChimp, Yesware and more.
Pricing: Starting from $45/User/Month
Website: www.getbase.com
Streak
Streak is a great CRM software for Gmail enthusiasts. Technically a browser plugin, Streak is great for smaller teams as they can work directly out of their Gmail inbox.
This tool makes it very easy to track views, schedule emails, and send mass emails, as well as create separate email threads that cater to different teams (e.g. sales, HR, support, etc).
Pricing: From $49/user/month.
Website: www.streak.com
ConvergeHub
ConvergeHub is a cloud-based CRM software that is great for SMBs – especially considering the fact that these businesses don’t have to deal with multiple repositories, but rather one central platform.
Additionally, users can store contact lists and design campaigns as well as manage all sales activities. ConvergeHub includes built-in SalesForce automation and marketing automation modules too.
Pricing: Starts from $9/user/month (Starter package) up to $59/user/month (Premium package).
Website: www.convergehub.com
SugarCRM
This CRM has a great solution for small businesses, called Sugar Professional. The platform offers customer experience solutions, creating a simple and consistent experience.
Each user can customize and use this tool wherever and whenever. Sugar Shell helps you automate workflows and thanks to actionable intelligence you have the right intel for each customer interaction.
Pricing: Sugar Professional ( $40,- user/month, 10 user minimum)
Website: www.sugarcrm.com
vTiger CRM
vTiger is another all-in-one CRM software made for small businesses. This tool offers a great deal in terms of sales automation, email marketing and project / inventory management.
They also offer web-to-CRM forms to help users capture relevant contact info as well as prioritise that info. Plus, all features have been improved based on the feedback of their customer base.
Pricing: Depends on the package you select (Sales CRM, Help Desk or All-In-One), but pricing can range anywhere from free to $30/user/month.
Website: www.vtiger.com
Now that you know more about the options you have in terms of CRM software for small businesses, it’s time to start assessing.
Some things you may want to ‘chew on’ before you make your decision include implementation and the technical assistance required, user minimums, usability, costs and of course, with the new GDPR in place – security features.
As we mentioned previously in this article, integration options are a particularly important factor in that you can combine your CRM software with all of the tools in your present toolkit rather than having to import data manually – which can cost you a lot of time and energy. Mopinion Feedback Analytics software works with several CRM software providers including SalesForce, HubSpot and Marketo.
Of course, when you have several options available to you, the choices can be overwhelming. Luckily, we’ve done the hard work of comparing and testing CRM products for you. To help you find the right CRM for your business, read Choosing a CRM Software: A Buyer’s Guide, which answers your common questions and outlines the best approach for choosing and implementing a solution.