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Want to streamline your sales process, gather and organize leads/customers’ data effectively and maximize conversions? Well, then you need a CRM.
This review will help you understand what it is and provide you with a list of some best CRM software for small and large businesses. Ready? Let’s dive right in:
What’s CRM & What are the Ingredients of a Great CRM Platform?
Acronym for Customer Relationship Management CRM is a highly effective sales and marketing tool to organize all sales data in one place, make additions to it and keep your sales pipeline updated regularly. It captures every touchpoint your business has with clients and prospects, including email, calls, SMS, website visit, social media, advertisements, and so on.
This allows your salespeople to learn more about particular customers, fine-tune sales funnels with precise data and ensure maximum conversions. CRM also helps with customer relationship management by providing the sales team with powerful customer support tools. Some key ingredients of an excellent CRM software include:
- Ease of use and understandable dashboards/reports
- Contact management to manage all potential and current clients’ profiles
- Customization of data, and sales processes, and ease of app integration
- In-depth reporting and forecasting
- Automation of sales tasks and integration with other sales tools
Some best CRM Software for every business
Table of Contents
HubSpot
Hands down, HubSpot is the best CRM software for both small and large businesses. It is cost-effective, so budding startups can easily get started (those on a tight budget can even start using HubSpot for free with its forever free plans). And as they grow, they can upgrade the software to leverage its more powerful features.
HubSpot CRM has a sleek and straightforward interface providing a breakdown of the entire sales pipeline on the dashboard. Plus, you can get more data like all sales activities, contacts, user performance, etc., with detailed reporting.
HubSpot’s mobile app can be downloaded on Android and iPhone, allowing you to access email tracking, phone calls, email templates, and sales data while also receiving real-time notifications. The CRM can easily be integrated with over 300 apps and services, including lead generation tools, WordPress, email marketing companies, etc. Some noteworthy features are:
- Create personalized email sequences for new and existing customers
- Real-time notifications for the behavior of leads
- Integrate with popular platforms like Shopify, Microsoft Dynamics, and Salesforce
- Sort contacts based on custom filters
- Schedule tasks, ticket creations, and emails
Zoho
Today’s internet marketing is incomplete without the use of cloud technology; that’s where Zoho jumps in. This cloud-based suite of CRM tools allows you to run your business with ease. You’ll get a set of powerful sales and marketing features, including SaaS apps and other online productivity tools. Zoho helps businesses generate leads, organize contacts, manage sales, offer customer support, and a lot more.
You can also integrate Zoho with other marketing tools you’re already using for your business. It also allows you to capture leads via social media, offer support using integrate live chat, create and segment visitors, and so on. Plus, you can manage multichannel contacts like social media, email, live chat, and phone on a single dashboard.
Moreover, its AI-based voice assistant helps you create intuitive dashboards and forecast market trends with ease. Some more key features include:
- Prioritize leads with a lead scoring feature
- Very in-depth analytics reports for data-driven decision making
- Has a mobile app to keep the team in the loop
- Allows you to define team roles and collaborate with ease
- Integrated security measures to safeguard your sales and leads data
Insightly
Without a doubt, an incredibly versatile CRM platform offering highly customizable dashboards and insights to keep track of completed and in-progress sales. It comes with a lot more features helping businesses manage contacts and integrate different project management software into the sales funnel. Insightly has very rich lead management tools, which can be a little overwhelming for new users, but with a little bit of fiddling around, they can get their hands on the most powerful features and data sets.
Insightly separates leads and contacts where the former represents your potential clients that your sales team has just started contacting. You can leverage custom fields to add more info about leads while all the emails, notes, phone calls, and other data are tagged to every contact automatically. Some key features include:
- Highly customizable sales funnel with drag and drop functionality
- Powerful and in-depth reporting with a series of dashboards for different actives
- Seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Bi
- Mobile app for both Android and iOS that allows lead addition and management
- Auto lead assignment and activity sets to keep the sales team on important tasks
Pipedrive
It wouldn’t be wrong to state that Pipedrive takes the crown in user-friendliness because of its simple and fast dashboard. You can view the entire sales process and control every aspect of it with the help of the Pipeline Management feature. Besides the clean and highly visual interface of pipeline management, you also get sales reporting, email integration, mobile app integration, sales forecasting, and much more.
Although you don’t get segmentation features within the pipeline as you do with most CRM software listed here, its simple interface and user interface make it a piece of cake for every business to maintain relationships with their customers. The mobile app of Pipedrive is available for both Android and iOS that sends you to live sales alerts and email reminders. Some of its key features include:
- Quick integration with apps like Zapier, Trello, Google Apps, and more with API
- Keep sales communications in one place with email integration
- Beautiful and conversion-focused email templates
- Allows you to predict the sales and analyze trends
- Frequent backups coupled with secure encryptions will keep your data safe and secure
Freshworks
Previously known as Freshsales, Freshworks is a well-known and widely used CRM tool that works incredibly well for businesses of all sizes. It’s straightforward to use and has a straight sales-oriented approach offering all features a business might need for conversion maximization. Freshsales has a very detailed yet well-organized dashboard offering access to emails, contact management, phone calls, detailed reports, and a lot more.
If the intelligent, web-based interface doesn’t cut it for your marketing team, Freshsales also offers a mobile app that allows them to make sales on the go. The software leverages an AI-based lead scoring system to help the marketing and sales team prioritize leads and focus more on the ones likely to convert.
Freshworks also allows you to set up workflow automation, track events, receive actionable conversion insights, and leverage 360-degree views to see all important customer details like touchpoints and profiles on a single screen. Some top features of Freshworks include:
- Auto lead assignment and grouping of the sales team
- Visual sales pipeline representation with drag-and-drop navigation
- Integration of web-based platform with mobile app
- Auto-update for contact profiles
- Allows phone calls and appointment booking
Agile CRM
Without a shred of doubt, Agile CRM is one of the best CRM software for small and large businesses ever created. You get everything from contact management, marketing, and sales insights, and customer service reports at one dashboard in a well-organized and easy-to-understand manner. With the help of this CRM, you can even view contact information in a 360-degree view allowing your team to easily understand and digest every detail needed to make long-term relations with them.
Agile CRM comes with a hoard of useful features, including project management, sales team gamification for fun-filled competitions, calendars, events, detailed reports, timelines, and much more. If in a hurry, you can access quick reports and drill down to specific areas of the sales pipeline to quickly know what’s happening.
The tool comes with single-page contact management, one-click calling, scheduling of appointments, email newsletters and even landing page creation, email sending, and tons of other marketing tools. And if all of this is not enough to make you bounce off the walls, then you will be excited to know that it also comes with a helpdesk, support ticketing, and many similar features to make customer service a breeze for your team. Some of the key features are:
- Integrated marketing automation allows the creation of web forms and landing pages
- Create and manage multichannel campaigns with a drag-and-drop interface
- Integrated live chat windows
- Advanced level lead tracking, analysis, and reporting
- Only $99.99 a month for one user – you can get a discount as well for advance payment of 2 years
Salesforce
The giant and perhaps one of the oldest CRM software in the field – Salesforce cannot be left out of any list of best CRM software for businesses. You can use it to drive leads from a personalized customer journey and leverage its intuitive marketing platform to get more sales using SMS, emails, digital ads, and social media.
Being one of the pioneers in the CRM space, Salesforce has been in the industry for over 20 years, which is why it offers a holistic set of tools for any business to make contact with leads and ensure a high conversion rate.
The tool comes with a range of incredible features ranging from basic to highly advanced, providing a solution to all types of needs for sales, marketing, customer support, team productivity, commerce, and a lot more. Some key features include:
- Offers guided onboarding allows getting to know the tool quickly
- Create custom reports and dashboards
- Automatically track meetings and emails
- Support for email and social media
- Enterprise-level ongoing support and security
Parting Words:
There’s no doubt CRM software has made the life of business owners and their sales team easier than they could ever imagine. However, you need to use the one that offers precisely the features you want at the price you can afford.
We suggest going through this review again with your sales manager to ensure the insights of actual people on the ground are added to your decision-making.