Management Software

Best CRM Software for Small Businesses in 2021

It is a fact that relationships management is the most important part of running a business. This is irrespective of whether you take into account shoppers or different organizations.

It is critical to keep up to date on developing discussions with existing clients while likewise adequately overseeing new leads.

Your customer satisfaction depends on your ability to offer attentive, personalized engagement with your clients, even your improvement demands you continue looking out for new customers too.

That is why Customer relationship management (CRM) software comes to help make this crucial process possible.

A good CRM software should allow companies to manage customer interaction and customer data. It should have the ability to automate marketing, sales, and customer support.

Moreover, it should help you access business information, and manage partner, vendor, and employee relationships.

However, because CRMs can perform so many different functions, finding the right one can be overwhelming.

To help you find the right CRM software, we researched and analyzed dozens of options. Here is a list of our 2021 best picks for CRM software and an explanation of how we chose them.

Salesforce

This software has recently become the standard in CRMs. Although the company now offers over a dozen different products, its many-featured and highly customizable sales CRM remains the basis of its offerings.

You can use Salesforce to take leads through a personalized customer journey and use the intelligent marketing platform to drive more sales through emails, SMS messaging, social media, and digital advertising.

While small businesses can take advantage of the lower-priced tiers, the plans and features of the Salesforce system are suited for larger businesses.

Pricing:

Plans for small businesses start at $25/month per user billed annually.

Freshsales

Freshsales CRM software is easy to use straightforward even if you’ve never operated anything more complicated than emailing. You’ll also find in-app video tutorials, articles, and a support person just a few clicks away.

It has an excellent dashboard that gives you immediate access to contact management, reports, emails, phone calls, and more. And, if the intuitive, web-based interface wasn’t enough, there are also mobile apps so you can make sales wherever you go.

Pricing:

Pricing starts at $12/month per user (billed annually).

Zoho CRM

This CRM software supports small businesses, coordinates contacts, markets their brand, runs sales, provides customer support and a lot more. You’ll get a helpful set of marketing and sales features with SaaS apps and online productivity tools.

SalesSignals

SalesSignals, is the basis for understanding how and when contacts, leads, and customers are linked with your company. It provides real-time notifications for email opens, website visits, campaign activity, social mentions, and other actions. For example, if you’re managing an email campaign with your contacts, you’ll be notified when that person opens or clicks a link in the email.

Pricing:

Zoho has a free plan for up to 3 users, but the really good features are in the paid plans. Those start at $12/month per user (billed annually).

HubSpot CRM

HubSpot is simple to use and suggests a wide range of CRM tools to running the customer journey. It even offers forever free plans with limited features for their CRM, Marketing, Sales, and Service Hubs.

With this software, you would be able to see your entire sales dropdown right on your dashboard. If you want more data, you can view all contacts and sales operations, detailed reports, and performance on a user or team basis.

Pricing:

The core CRM software is free, but for more powerful features you can upgrade to a paid plan for Marketing, Sales, or Service hubs (starting at $50/month). You can also upgrade to the Growth Suite starting at $113/month for a single user.

Keap

Keap is one of the best CRM software systems to be applied in a small business in order to achieve their goal towards real growth.

For 18 years, Keap has helped small businesses be more systematic so they can deliver a great solution and close more business deals. Keap’s award-winning CRM solution serves more than 200,000 users around the world.

Keap’s platform manages your customer information and daily work in one place, freeing you up from repetitive tasks so you have more time to focus on growing your business and delivering great service.

Pricing

Pricing starts at $79 per month & includes everything you need to grow your business.

What are the key points to look for the best CRM software?

As we are living in a competitive online world, there are tens of CRM software platforms, according to your business information and your objective to grow to develop your performance, you could determine some essential points to select the right CRM.

However, there are some general points to look for, here are a few things to keep in mind.

1. Ease of Use

The first point you should look for in a CRM software is how easy and clear it is to use. You will be using your CRM software every single day so as to simplify the work. Therefore, if it isn’t easy to use it won’t help you reach your goals.

The latest survey shows that 67% of businesses think that ease of use is the most important point of their CRM software.

2. Customization

Every single business has specific characteristics, we looking for the CRM that has customizing features, for sales and projects, to make the software serve different teams.

3. Reporting

It is also clear and evident that a powerful CRM allows the elaboration of various data sets and uses them for reporting.

4. 4. Automation and integrations

Realizing that your CRM is not just a contact listing, it needs to combine branding and sales as well as the lead new generation to your brand.

Your CRM should store name, email address, phone number, and maybe even social links that could be used for online marketing strategy.

What to expect for 2021?

As CRMs have improved, they have become more advanced to integrate and automate an extensive range of business processes. Social media links and email combination, for example, they have been characterized as the Customer Relationship Management evolution.

The effect is social media like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook are not just about exploring and advertising your brand but also establishing confidence, credibility, and personality.

In 2021, looking for more automation and integration features to simplify CRM usage has known great popularity. It helps in productivity enhancement, and expands the field of business operations process that CRM tools effected.

Note, looking for a suitable customer relationship management software for your business? Fill out the below questionnaire to have our vendor partners contact you about your needs?

Q: What are some examples of CRM Software?

A: Customer relationship management (CRM) software refers to any tech solution service that helps businesses run and connect with the current and potential customer. Some examples of leaders in the CRM software industry include Salesforce, Bitrix24, Freshsales.

Q: What are the differences between ERP and customer relationship management (CRM) software?

A: CRM structure is developed to record and store every segment of information regarding customer interactions. This detailed data is standardized and easily shareable throughout the organization.

Like CRM, ERP software is prepared to streamline business processes. While a CRM focuses on the sales section of the company, an ERP system is inserted and applied across different departments.

 Q: What makes a CRM software “open source”?

A: To determine software as open-source, it typically means that some or all of the source code is accessible to users for reviews and commenting or suggestion or modification.

Developers and programmers that want the capability to highly customize their experience CRM software often pick out for open-source solutions.

Firstly, some organizations until today think about CRM software as just a system that collects and stores data about customers and handles their relationship with them.

Beyond that, through the effective functionals provided by the CRM software the company can increase productivity, that drives to increase revenues, and expand more the base of customer foundation as well.

The CRM software ensures better customer satisfaction over a speedy customized customer service, and eventually more sales and customer loyalty.

Whereas other businesses, count on the customer relationship management CRM software, to streamline and control, the traffic of the workflow day to day, which would increase the team’s productivity and efficiency.

Estimation statistic from the Nucleus research showed that the average return on investment from CRM is nearly $9.00 for every dollar spent.

So if you are still thinking that CRM software is just a data mining tool you must change your opinion after complete reading this blog.

How CRM Software Increases The Productivity

The best CRM software must match with your need and strategy to grow the performance and revenue, through some options they offer open source to customize the plan of the work

Thus when we talk about the sales and customer support.

The CRM can streamline the process, control the workflow activities and interactions, deliver the proper customers information to the sales, marketing departments, as customer service as well, through some essential tools functions such as:

1- Integration With Email And Phone

Keeping the customer data updated all the time, by using the CRM platform that maintains and store email addresses and phone number in the system automatically.

Operating the different communications channels within CRM, keep the process controlled, where information can easily be shared to the right agent or department, this allows employees to focus on actual customer care rather than on logging calls and entering data.

2- Integrated Client Profile

The integration with customer’s data allows everyone that interacts with the customer to access all the information seamlessly, which includes the previous communications.

Within the detailed customer profile, that allows an easy and vast view about communications, document, and promotions associated with a specific customer on one convenient screen.

As the team can work on desktop or individually on mobile from multiple locations through the network, the need to deliver a coordinating customer data and communications become vital with the integrated client profile feature.

3- Mass communications

The CRM software offers the mass communications tool that is vital, to deliver and provide the customer with information needed simply and effectively.

This communication tool uses a customized email or SMS to whole or segmented customer lists, in less time than the traditional methods.

What makes the CRM an intelligence choice, have the ability to keep continuous communication with the customer, analyze and review the effectiveness contact operation, With mass communications through CRM, all contacts are automatically logged and organized within the customer profile for convenient access in the future.

4- Management Mission System

Internal communication would be more effective when employees use a unified single point to delegate missions and participate in projects and hold contact between diverse departments as well.

The management mission system is a vital point for any CRM platform, allow to set various tasks, share pertinent files, and prioritize them, all these features give the organization an overview of the progress of the project.

The fact of using a unified point doesn’t mean that should work just on office location, there more options through the cloud-based solution offered for member works on remote or other various locations.

5- Integrated Information-Based

The essential function of integrated information-base is to offer employees a quick and easy access for the pieces of information, they need to deliver a proper and consistent message to customers that meet their requirements.

When a customer contacts the service support to ask for any information about product or service promotion, it important that precise answer is communicated regardless of who provides the service.

This the purpose of information-base, offered by CRM software, the customer support, or any other department can count on the information-base can quickly access answers to frequently asked questions and account details in order to assist customers with the answers that they need, that push them to be more productive away of chaos.

6- Reminders & Calendars

Commitment with appointments not less important of any other factor, and deliver to a customer the message of incompetence.

The fact for creating more trusty with an employee about the customer  deadline or any other timeline, improve employee efficiency and leave the effect of organization and professionalism and this drive more loyalty.

The reminders and calendars are an essential tool on CRM software, allow employees to count on one unified platform for day-to-day tasks and other functions organization.

Corporate calendars may be integrated with personal calendars to prevent double booking and to streamline the scheduling process.

7- Mobile Access

As the mobile device becomes a part of our daily life, to the business world become most important, access to the CRM form a mobile device increasingly matter, as mobility and traveling become part of work in some situations.

Due to the new technology many CRM software offers a mobile app, to make access possible from anywhere, to search customer information, manage reports, access to files templates it simple now.

Include the data update about customers or employees before the meeting is vital to a mission that can be completed by accessing the CRM on distance.

Cloud-Based Infrastructure Solution

Another technology solution increasingly matters where businesses can’t afford any more the high cost of the desk infrastructure, especially the startup businesses.

Cloud-based CRM software corporate for effective growth which translate on decrease expenses of the office technology infrastructure, software, and hardware, with fewer employees on another side.

With the progress, the cloud-based CRM software witness improved reliability and more data security, compared to their software-based counterparts.

5 Ways To Expand Your Customer Base

It’s all about realizing who your customers and prospective customers are and promote the relationship you have with them.

In other words, customer relationship management is the art of maintaining and running a good relation with your clients, understand your customer expectations, and offer more than they can expect.

Due to the new technology of CRM software process will be more streamline and defined ;

1- Reach The Right Customer

One of the marketing surveys showed that 79% of all marketing leads are never  complete the process of purchase.
Source, PARDOT

By using the CRM software you will achieve the most benefits as possible through the marketing tools, email, social, marketing automation

The sales and marketing department now can have an obvious overview of customers and new leads, they can create and target engaging communications to turn prospects into customers and reach key decision-makers faster.

2- Build A Sustainable Relationship For The Long Term

The statement has shown that 46% of the sales leaders are interested in deep customer relationships as the key for sustaining success.
Source, Salesforce*State Of Sale*

If you have a profound realizing about your customer’s interactions, and overview on his history from the beginning with your company, you will have the chance to build a strong relationship founded on trust mutual success, the technology of CRM software helps you to achieve this goal in obvious steps ;

A- Explore Their Needs And Challenges, use the CRM system to record notes what matters to your customers, their preferences, challenges, and needs at the end of each interaction, thus you can use this information at the next exchange, pick up exactly where you left off with a quick review.

B- Engage In The Plan, after realizing and understanding your customer’s business objectives you can recommend the proper promotion for products or services that meets their goals, on accurate time, by using CRM software you will know more detail, such as what they have purchased and how they are using your products or services, so you can provide the most relevant content and information for the next plan.

C- Expand Your 1-To-1 Relationships, more clients prefer the customize the personal experience, and as your business starts growing, it becomes more challengeable to know the details of each interaction and customer, CRM system manages this operation effectively by hosting emails templates, set up task reminders, and enable phone calls to help you connect with customers faster and easier.

3- Decrease The Cost Of Sales

The probability of selling to a new prospect is 5%–20%. The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60%–70%.

Attracting the new leads is essential to keep growing but it would be a little bit challengeable or expensive, you can offset the expenses  acquisition costs through sales to your existing customer base, get a deep and vast overview of your upsell-cross sell opportunities, the CRM can help you to improve the sales performance in some points,

– Improving Sales Efficiency, give more attention and priority to the appropriate leads and opportunities that are highly estimated to convert and close depending on customer interaction.

-Boosting Sales Effectiveness, realize which customers are active, to determine the right time to reach them for an optimal exchange and response.

-Increasing Upsell And Cross-Sell Opportunities: have a vast overview of all opportunities that are on the tack, and deals previously on progress  so far.

-Discover Referral Opportunity, instead of keeping paying to attract more new leads, or wasting time cold calling, catch untapped opportunities in your existing market segmentation customers.

4- Provide Better Customer Service

Whenever the service offered to the customer is on the top customized and accurately, you will win the customers loyalty.

The CRM offers a unified database to facilitate the work for each one of customer team support, can access quickly and easily to a customer’s complete history, everyone can quickly provide personalized messages and solutions, with the right resources.

Smoother interactions build trust and encourage repeat business.

5- Improve Customer Retention

As a conclusion for the previous steps that drive you to grow your hallmark and business, the obvious visibility across all relationships and interactions with your customer can help your teams proactively address at-risk accounts and present satisfied customers with new opportunities at just the right moment.

Invest your time and money into the proper CRM software that accurate and meet your plans, and strong customer relationships will pay dividends for years to come.