What Is CRM Software? & How to Pick the Best CRM Software

Why your small business needs CRM

CRM is an acronym for Customer Relationship Management.

It is simply software that manages all kinds of interactions between your company and the customers and potential ones. This software aims at a simple goal to grow your business and improve the quality of services that your business offers.

CRM software will help your business to build systems that improve sales and customer satisfaction in many ways.

CRM is better described as a comprehensive system rather than a tool. It will connect different sections of your business, gaining the maximum benefit. CRM will help your business in terms of contacts and sales management.

CRM tools nowadays can help manage the whole cycle of the customer lifecycle with your business. It can also help drive sales, online sales, and marketing and work towards customer satisfaction.

CRM software solutions can also focus on the connections between your business and individuals. This CRM solution will help you organize the relationship with clients, audience, suppliers, and your employees. CRM benefits may include finding new customers, supporting your clients, and servicing their businesses more comprehensively.

CRM software is a new way to manage your business. It gives you and your team a novel strategy to achieve the best business results. CRM software can do tasks such as storing contact information, recording business transactions, and managing marketing strategies.

CRM will provide your team with data more efficiently in a more organized way. Anyone working with you can access all the data concerning customers, sales, and human resources. This availability of data makes your business more productive and enhances growth. Smaller companies will benefit even more from this technology, allowing the startup to grow faster in an organized way.

How can a CRM benefit your small business?

How can a CRM benefit your small business?

We will show you how CRM software can improve your company in simple points to help you while deciding whether you will need to use one or not.

• Contacts organization.

The contact management software will help you reach and categorize every content and related data easier. CRM will allow you to merge all associated data on each content in one place. These details include cell phone numbers, social media accounts, business information, emails, and many more.

• Create a customer persona.

After gathering all your customers’ data in a single place, the CRM will help you learn more about them. You will know what type of persons are more likely to be your customers. This will help you to modify your marketing plan and use targeted ads to reach all potential customers. The identified persona will also help you deliver a more personalized experience for your user.

• Monitor different operations.

CRM software produces reports monitoring your business performance in many departments. It will provide you with a detailed reporting system for things like sales, marketing, campaigns, customer data, and more.

Reviewing these reports regularly will help you find problems and solve them, improve growth, and find out how the whole investment is doing. Information on sales and your trending products can show you how to get more from your current sales process.

• Save time and money.

Using a good CRM tool will allow you to automate different processes that would usually take hours of paid work to finish. Tasks like data entry would be from the past, which will allow you more free time for developing your business.

The ability to monitor your business closely in terms of sales activities, customer support, and performance is a guaranteed way for fast growth and gaining more money.

We can safely assume that the CRM system lays the foundation of your business’s success.

If you are concerned about the budget, then don’t worry there are great free CRM software options. Later in this article we will show you a few of the best free CRM options. These options include agile crm, zoho, salesforce, and more.

Top CRM Software 4 Small Business

Creating a successful startup is a great challenge nowadays. You need to have thousands of clients and keep track of their interactions with your business simply.

This massive amount of data requires a way to be organized and processed in ways that increase the growth and sales of your business. CRM software is made for this purpose. Using CRM software in your business nowadays has become a necessity. Neglecting CRM causes you more losses over time.

The CRM does a great job in managing the customers’ data and the potential leads. This frees your time and energy to focus on improving your business in all other ways.

You don’t need to spend a lot on CRM; there is a lot of free sales management software. We will also show you cheap CRM for startups. CRM and sales management work together, a good and easy CRM system will improve your sales.

There is a lot of excellent CRM software out there and choosing among them is a difficult choice. We have gathered detailed information about 4 of the biggest CRM software providers in the market. We will help you compare CRM for small business. We will show you the features of each software to know how it will help your business.

After reading this article, you will find the best CRM software for your startup and the best CRM software for small business.

We will discuss the prices of each one and show you also the pros and cons of each provider.

Read the following details and make sure you study all the options before choosing the best available software for your business.

1.Drip

Drip is the ultimate CRM tool in the market. It is the best option on the market, especially for eCommerce businesses, to turn fans into loyal customers. Drip is an easy-to-use CRM software that fills all your business needs in one place.

Drip is an ECRM system that will help your customer through the buying process, making the experience more personal to increase sales, gaining more retained customer value and purchases.

Drip is a specific type of CRM software built for eCommerce businesses, especially for small ones. All the features of Drip are easier to use for first-time CRM users. The interface is simple, and the user experience is excellent. If you have a service business, Drip is a perfect CRM for a service business. Drip can also help you to work efficiently with sales crm systems.

Drip Features:

1. Marketing automation.

Marketing automation is one of the main features of any CRM software. Drip is one of the best choices that offer solid email marketing automation.

Drip features an email builder that will create emails an easy job for you with a group of ready templates. However, users mentioned that the templates library is somehow limited to their competitors, so it would be nice if they would expand that template library furthermore.

Drip excels in this field by adding a group of pre-built automation workflow for you to use directly. This automation is beneficial in the eCommerce world. This automation includes cart abandonment, Black Friday deals, customer win-back, and many other essential features.

You can also build your particular workflows using Drip’s builder. The platform offers an excellent support and integration system which can give you the freedom to create any automated process you can think of.

Most CRM platforms offer this feature, but Drip is heavily focused on eCommerce giving you more options than other programs. They have made a great deal making the program an easy and straightforward platform filled with powerful features for beginner CRM users.

1. Personalization.

Drip allows you to create specialized customer journeys for your brand. This is important for any eCommerce brand to increase sales and maximize profits by retaining more customers.

This allows you to record and analyze the ways people interact with the website in different ways. Drip’s focus on eCommerce makes this service more beneficial for small businesses using CRM for the first time.

1. Multichannel marketing

Social media is essential nowadays in addition to traditional methods as email marketing and on-site interactions. Drip offers many social integrations and some Facebook\Instagram advertising features that are great and helpful.

1. Analytics and reporting.

To know your CRM strategies are working and the marketing strategies are paying off, you need trusted data.  Drip offers analytics and reports mainly focused on eCommerce.

Pricing:

Drip’s pricing starts at 49$/mo for the basic plan and 122$/mo for the pro plan with more features. They also have an enterprise plan for larger companies.

Pros:

1. CRM software specialized in eCommerce.
2. Suitable for CRM beginners.
3. Functional automation and integration features.

4.It is the best sales CRM for small business and offers an excellent cloud crm for small business.

Cons:

1. Higher prices than competitors.
2. Many CRO features are absent.
3. More email templates are needed.
4. Buggy performance.

Salesforce

Salesforce has launched the Salesforce CRM solution as one of the top CRM software on the market. Salesforce company has an entire marketing solution system, including systems for community cloud, analytics, and a lot more. The salesforce CRM system is intact and helpful. Salesforce is the best CRM and project management for small business.

As a leading CRM software, Salesforce will help you gather all your client’s information in one place. You will turn more leads into customers, increasing the growth of your business. Your team will be grateful for using such a powerful tool as it increases their productivity and allows them to follow work remotely from anywhere and from different platforms.

This level of coordination and organization delivered by Salesforce will significantly impact your business’s net growth and profits.

Salesforce features:

1. Task/ Activity Management: Follow and manage the different tasks of your teams, set new ones, and sync the data with your official calendar apps.
2. Contact and account manager: manage and access your contact information to gather essential data about your clients. This will help you improve the sales and marketing process by adding more personalization. You can also follow each customer’s actions allowing the sales team to overview each customer’s journey. The software can gather all the relevant data about each account in one place.
3. Customer Contract Management: Follow through on all your customers’ contracts. It allows you to manage negotiations, define terms, and set conditions. All the changes are documented instantly and agreed upon in one place.
4. Quote and Order Management: Easily make quotes for customers depending on pricing and product information. This can also help the sales reps process orders as all the required data is gathered in one place. They can also assign orders for each department to complete.
5. Email marketing: Email marketing is a crucial marketing strategy nowadays. Salesforce allows you to send emails in bulk to all your contact lists. It offers the ability to send customized content for your customers based on their previous interactions.
6. Campaign Management: Manage all your marketing campaigns broadcasted on different channels in one place. You will be able to make adjustments based on customer data and follow all the results and analytics.
7. Lead Management: Explore different options in the lead management chain and help reps guide the contacts through the buying process while tracking their progress on the way and finding the best message to take them to the next step.
8. Salesforce customer relationship management is a vital cornerstone in their service.

Pricing:

Salesforce CRM software offers multiple programs starting with a free trial and four other paid programs ranging between $25/user/month and $300/user/month.

Other add-on features are billed separately and can make the experience a bit pricey for beginners.

Salesforce Pros:

1. The most powerful CRM platform and software.
2. Edit features to meet your requirements.
3. Popular platforms make finding sales familiar with the software an easy job.

Salesforce Cons:

1. Not the cheapest option.
2. Helpful add-ons are paid for separately.
3. Setup is complex and takes time.
4. Interface packed with options making the simple tasks complex.
5. Customer support is a lot below the level of the service.

Freshsales

Freshsales is a CRM helpful platform that is concerned with increasing the productivity of your teams, especially the sales team. Its CRM software offers numerous tools that help in many tasks as automation of workflow, lead conversion, email management.

Freshsales is a CRM that also provides a great variety of integrations concerning productivity, marketing campaign, and team interactions. Freshsales is one of the best crm for startups.

Freshsales software is a simple one and easy to use. The platform gives you the freedom to generate your contacts as demanded. However, when you have your contacts, it gives you all you need to make the leads into sales and retained customers. Freshsales is one of the best crm systems for small business and offers the best crm features. Some may say that Freshsales is the best free crm for small business.

Freshsales Features:

1.Leads and Contact Management.

Freshsales offers a simple and straightforward display of contacts. It shows a lot of helpful information concerning all the activities of the connection. It shows the client’s data from the company’s website, their posts from social media, and their messages.

It will also show you how this client is worth for your company. All this data shown in one place helps with customer service and satisfaction.

2. Team Communication.

This is an excellent feature in Freshsales software. Its communication features will allow all the teams to communicate without leaving the software.

The platform syncs with all primary email services as Gmail, syncing both incoming and outgoing messages. All emails are arranged automatically according to the clients for easy tracking. To make emailing more efficient, Freshsales offers email templates to make the process faster.

You also can send bulk campaigns to any group of contacts saved in your database. The software will tell you who and when every email was opened in real-time notifications.

You can also add notes to each call log and save it to the contact who said it to be aware of what happened next time you call this client.

3. Interface and In Use.

Freshsales software interface is very user-friendly, which makes you like the software instantly. You will find all the phone, email, and contact tools at the top of the platform.

The platform design and menus will make you feel fulfilled and make your job easier.

4. Support.

Freshsales CRM gets a lot of support from the leading Freshworks company. You can call or email in any business hour from Monday to Friday, and they will follow with your request quickly. The platform also offers an extensive video library for any issue you face.

Pricing:

Freshsales have five different plans according to the size of your business. The first plan is entirely free and offers an unlimited number of contacts, integrated email access, and access to the mobile app. It is a handy free option for small businesses. The plans’ prices vary from $12 per user per month to $79 per user per month. Freshsales will offer the basic crm for small business and more.

Freshsales Pros:

1.Easy interface and mobile phone app.

2. Automatic call recorder and a built-in phone.
3. Double method email syncing and sending bulk emails.
4. Fressales is one of the best client management software compilers you may use.

Freshsales Cons:

1. Fragile lead generation methods.
2. Few integrations with project management software.

Sendinblue

Sendinblue is mainly an email marketing solution that aims to help small and medium-sized businesses.

It offers an easy interface and simple tools to help you manage email marketing, newsletters, task automation, transactional emails for eCommerce, and some basic CRM features. It also adds significant value to businesses depending on email marketing by offering SMS functionality.

SMS marketing is an efficient tool necessary to increase sales and interaction with customers. They have an excellent live chat service that allows you to interact with clients and fans in a direct chat. Sendinblue is a tremendous free online crm software for small business.

Even their paid plan is arguably the best low-cost crm for small business.

Sendinblue Pros:

1. The software efficiently produces awesome emails that help your brand to communicate more effectively with the customers.
2. Adding contacts and composing new emails is a lot easier than other competitors.
3. Specific statistics and analytics help you to measure your growth and success accurately.
4. Selective email sending to a group of contacts.
5. Daily Free 300 emails limit so that you try it ideally before subscribing to a paid plan.
6. Offers all the basic CRM features.
7. A rich email processing with tons of features such as auto-responder and transactional emails.

Sendinblue Cons:

1.Poor customer service in the initial stages of using the product; this wastes a lot of unnecessary time.

2. Laggy interface when creating email templates, and it cannot make a master template that can be used after that to make empty templates.

3. Setting up the account for the first time can be time-consuming and difficult.

Sendinblue Features:

1. Automated Marketing Communications:

Sendinblue marketing automation improves your contact management through specific workflows. It comes with several preset workflow templates to help you automate the marketing process and improve the customers’ service. The software offers templates for welcome emails, cart reminders, and many more.

2.Transactional emails and SMS.

3.Email marketing and SMS campaigns.

4.Dynamic list and order tracking.

5. Newsletter creator.

Create new professional newsletters easily by just dragging and dropping your favorite blocks to build a well-designed newsletter in a few minutes.

6. Attract target audience.

SendinBlue collects the email and contact information of the fans and potential customers. This data can be used easily to make targeting campaigns with high success rates.

Sendinblue Pricing:

All the plans include unlimited contact access, and pricing depends on the number of emails you need to send each month. The Lite plan includes $25 per month for 40,000 emails. The essential plan costs $39 per month for 60,000 emails. The premium plan costs $66 per month for 120,000 emails. Sendinblue offers a custom plan for enterprises with variable prices for companies who need more than 350,000 emails per month.

The free plan is surprisingly great; it is a free trial without a timeout period and does not need a credit card. You need to enter some basic information about your company and use the program for free.

In the end, we hope that this article has shown you the best crm for small business 2021 wise. Nowadays, using an online CRM system for your startup is mandatory. We have shown you a group of the best crm platforms for small business in 2021. Any promising startup should use sales management software.

There are many free crm systems for small business and multiple crm options for small business nowadays. If you like to develop your business, you also need to think about the best CRM for customer service.

HubSpot CRM

Hubspot CRM is an excellent tool to update your company on your current sales, marketing, and management status. It is an excellent choice a crm software for small business.
This process is seamless and easy. It will help your team to save some time.

Hubspot can also integrate more than 300 applications and services. This includes WordPress, lead management software as OptinMonster, marketing companies, and email management software. It can also be easily connected to email services likes Gmail and Outlook to record the email activity automatically.

Pros:

Hubspot is easy to use with a friendly interface that you get used to in a short time. The learning curve of the software can be cut into shorter periods using tutorials and customer support.
Real-time reporting and data management with the different team members. Templates are a great tool that saves a lot of time for the employee instead of rewriting the emails again.
Email tracking allows you to know when a potential client opens an email.
All transactions ongoing among the clients and employees are plotted and recorded.

Cons:
1.Hubspot pricing is only suitable for official enterprises, and it can be difficult to afford for small startups.

2.Leads can be challenging to organize.

3. The mobile application of HubSpot CRM could be a lot better. It only allows you to monitor the status of the customer request without being able to respond to it.

Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM is a well-known CRM platform that offers multiple features and can change the way you run your business at all. Zoho introduces many customization options that can keep up with growing teams and startups.

Zoho offers many valuable tools that we will show you in the following lines:

1.SalesSignals: This is a service that notifies your employees when any customers or potential clients interact with any channel concerning your product. These interactions may include visiting your website, mentions for your brand on social media, or opening your marketing emails.

2.SalesIQ: it is a valuable add-on that provides you with live chats, statistics based on your performance, and the behavior of your clients. This includes time spent on website and clicks; all the data is added to its respective clients so that the sales reps will have all the data needed about each client.

3.Artificial intelligence: AI features add a lot of functionality to the CRM, such as tracking customers’ data. After that, the system will suggest specific orders as the best time to reach out to each client or predicting the success of any process. The AI software predicts the success of each lead on a scale from 1 to 100.

4.Flexibility: Zoho is customizable in many ways; for example, you can create buttons that connect you directly to a particular action, such as the “create a proposal” button associated with your proposal software.

5.Additional features: Zoho is not limited to CRM software; it also has valuable additions such as Zoho power dialer and other products for human resources accounting, social media, email campaigns, and surveys.

Zoho can be used freely for three users or in a paid plan that starts from $12/month.