CRM software usually comes with a lot of different features and tools. They act as a database for maintaining customer relationships across all your channels, providing a great customer experience to generate more sales. As your business grows, manual customer relationship management processes become increasingly inefficient and costly.
Hence the need for effective CRM software to help you manage your customers, so you have more time to focus on growing your business. With many options available in the market, it can be difficult to make an informed decision on choosing CRM software for your business.
In this article, we will review the top 10 CRM software based on their marketing tools, features, sales capabilities, price, etc. to help you make your decision on which one to choose for your business.
What Is a CRM Software?
CRM (customer relationship management) software is an all-in-one online tool that helps businesses manage customer interactions, such as sending and tracking emails, managing customer experiences, generating leads, closing sales, and more. CRMs collect information from various channels such as social media, email campaigns, live chat, phone calls, personal interactions, feedback forms, etc., and analyze the data to analyze the customer’s purchase history, habits, and needs.
The goal is to improve the customer experience and satisfaction, turn prospects into customers, and then maintain and improve that relationship.
What Are the Advantages of Using a CRM Software?
CRM software can bring many benefits to your business. Some of these benefits include:
– Customer information management
One of the most essential benefits that CRM software can bring to your business is contact management that helps you centralize customer information from social media, emails, business cards, etc. to perform customer segmentation, identify customer profiles, know where they are coming from, and which demographics offer the best opportunities.
– Build relationships with customers
A CRM software gives you visibility into the customer from every angle, enabling your team to build lasting relationships with customers and tailor interactions to their needs and preferences.
– Automate your workflow
By automating data entry, CRM software not only reduces the time spent on tedious administrative tasks, such as manual data entry but also reduces the risk of human error. This allows you to focus on building relationships and fine-tuning your business.
– Improve collaboration
CRM software allows everyone in your company to access the same data in real-time, which can lead to better collaboration among team members.
-Generate reports
A business CRM can create reports on marketing, campaigns, sales, and customers. This allows you to monitor all the information coming in, identify issues, improve your sales processes, and find out how your overall ROI is really doing.
– Predict your sales process
The reports and information provided by CRM software allow you to predict future sales based on past sales data.
-Increase your overall ROI
The ability to track sales activities, manage sales teams, and improve operational efficiency for customer support and collaboration leads to increased productivity and reduced churn, which increases your ROI.
Here are the top 10 best CRM software you should consider for your business.
1. Hubspot
HubSpot is a platform founded in 2005 and known for its expertise in inbound marketing. It offers a completely free version of its CRM software with marketing tools that are quite popular with small businesses. HubSpot’s simple and dynamic platform has most of the features of other CRMs but offers arguably the best integration CRM environment than its competitors.
HubSpot is a great, easy-to-use CRM software that offers a wide range of cutting-edge CRM features such as contact management and leads conversion pipeline to manage the customer journey in a detailed dashboard visible to all team members. It even offers free lifetime plans with limited functionality for its CRM, marketing, sales, and service hubs.
Key features of HubSpot CRM
– Contact organization and management – You can connect your email inbox to their CRM and automatically sync and organize your contacts in one place.
– Customized workflow automation
-Create activity-based tasks that trigger leads.
-Consolidate the sales and marketing pipeline
-HubSpot CRM optimizes your sales process with sales engagement tools, price and quote configuration capabilities, and robust sales analytics and reporting to help sales managers manage their sales pipeline with full visibility.
– 300+ integrations – HubSpot also integrates with over 300 applications and services such as WordPress, email marketing companies, lead generation software, event planning, and organizing applications, and more.
You can also connect HubSpot to Gmail or Outlook to automatically record activity, capturing every email.
Email marketing – Hubspot CRM offers email templates and allows you to schedule emails, tasks, real-time notifications, create tickets and customize email sequences for prospects and existing customers and track your results with built-in analytics reports.
– Live Chat and Chatbots – With support tickets, productivity tools, and instant chat features, you can help your customers faster.
– Mobile Application – HubSpot has a mobile app for iPhone and Android,
Other features include
-Easily segment leads by creating custom filters to sort contacts.
– Make phone calls directly from the CRM
– Receive real-time notifications on lead behavior
– Store unlimited users, customer data, and up to one million contacts.
– It offers personalization, a task board and helps synchronize the marketing department.
– It automatically logs every activity and lets you see all contact information in one place.
Pros:
– Easy to navigate interface, especially for new users.
– Free plan available for unlimited users that you can upgrade at any time.
– Comes with all Google features like Gmail, Google Drive, and calendar. One mailbox and team conversations to access all messages in one place.
– Offers a marketing automation tool that includes live chat, landing pages, email marketing, ad management, document management, and more.
– Free email marketing and list segmentation
– A great form builder to capture lead information, with an extensive list of free templates and marketing tools.
– Ad management tools to track ROI on paid campaigns on Google, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.
– Additional free marketing tools, including an email signature builder, website reviewer, blog idea builder and marketing plan builder.
– Compatible with different integration platforms
-HubSpot’s paid add-ons offer features such as reporting, AI, and advanced automation.
Cons:
– Its free version lacks features such as a sales pipeline and phone-based customer support.
– Lack of project management tools
– Service plans beyond the basic level are prohibitively expensive for small businesses.
Pricing:
Free: The free plan of HubSpot CRM has full-fledged inbound marketing tools in a powerful customer database software with dashboard reports, company information, email tracking and templates, on-screen calls, and contact management to organize your customer journey and help manage and retain new leads.
Plus, the free plan has no time limit and allows you to manage a million contacts across your marketing, sales, and customer service workflows. Its free plan includes more than 90 report templates such as sales forecasts, sales funnel metrics, and sales activity information about team productivity and individual sales agent performance, which you can select and organize on customizable dashboards.
Plus, you can take advantage of integration with over 300 third-party applications. All of this has made HubSpot CRM one of the most successful freemium software in the customer relationship management space.
– Starter ($45/month): All the features of the free plan, plus additional forms, up to 50 email list segmentations, $1,000 of ad management, 10 reporting dashboards, and a limited number of conversational bots.
– Professional ($450/month): All the features of the free and starter plans, plus 2,000 email list segmentations, $10,000 of ad management, 25 reporting dashboards, and full chatbot functionality.
This plan also opens up additional features such as phone support, content policies, an SSL certificate, and a blog.
– Enterprise ($1,200/month): All the features of the Professional plan, plus user roles, event-based segmentation, predictive lead scoring, API calls, multi-touch revenue attribution, webhooks, and more.
Best for:
HubSpot is definitely the best CRM software for small businesses looking to grow with a scalable CRM. It’s also a great option for sales professionals and marketing teams because of its features and tools to capture, track, and grow leads in a database.
2. Salesforce
Salesforce is one of the cloud-based CRM software that offers a creative and comprehensive sales, marketing, and service solution that can be used effectively for all businesses, from large enterprises to small startups. While Salesforce is perhaps best known as the CRM giant that can handle large enterprise operations, it also offers solutions for small businesses called Salesforce Essentials, a limited version of the full platform.
Salesforce CRM allows you to guide potential customers through a personalized customer journey and use the intelligent marketing platform to increase sales through email, SMS, social media, and digital advertising.
By integrating the CRM software with other Salesforce applications, you can take advantage of seamless sales and marketing automation offerings, sales analytics, and cloud storage capabilities. In June 2021, Salesforce launched a new AI-assisted lead management tool, Einstein Relationship Insights.
This AI tool can help you identify and build new business relationships. It leverages your behaviors and interests to automatically find relevant relationships to build, increasing revenue and streamlining business growth.
Key Features of Salesforce CRM
Salesforce is packed with features, offering one of the most comprehensive feature lists of any CRM software on the market, while having an intuitive and easy-to-use interface.
-Salesforce Automation- Provides you with the tools to optimize and manage the performance of your sales team and track leads and customers more effectively with features such as contact management, lead management, opportunity management, pipeline management, forecasting, and territory management.
-Marketing Integration – This feature allows you to automate your marketing campaigns, attract new visitors, evaluate customers as leads to follow up on throughout the sales process, distribute marketing and promotional materials through various channels such as email, social media.
It also allows you to get customer analytics to improve marketing efforts and automate repetitive and time-consuming manual tasks. It supports email integration and allows you to run applications.
-Customer Service and Support – This feature consists of a set of tools such as live chat, customer self-service, and multi-channel management that allow you to meet the needs of customers by tracking their interactions with your business so you can focus on creating the best possible customer experience for each individual.
-Help Desk Automation- Help desk automation involves creating an electronic ticket that customer service representatives track and associate with customer profiles that include contact information and possibly purchase or asset history.
– Customized dashboards and reports – Salesforce’s customizable reports and dashboards update in real-time so sales professionals always have access to the most up-to-date data.
– Opportunity Management – With this module, you can close more deals by identifying opportunities.
– Contact Management – With this module, you can track metrics such as customer history, communications and social media mentions.
– Sales Performance Management – This module allows you to set sales goals and update targets for best sales performance.
– Visual Workflow – With this module, you can drag, drop, share and track files and updates.
– First stream feature – This allows you to see what you want to see first based on your settings.
Salesforce Essentials Features
Salesforce Essentials is the most basic paid tier and is a great choice for small businesses with less than 10 users because of its simpler setup and a smaller list of features. The main focus of Salesforce Essentials is to help you increase customer demand and offers the following benefits
-Mobile application – While Salesforce Essentials offers artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, robust email marketing tools, and excellent report customization solutions, one of the most notable features of this CRM software is its mobile application. Salesforceest’s mobile app is capable of performing almost all the functions of the web app, allowing you to easily monitor sales pipelines, manage leads, and communicate with other team members while on the go.
-A Learning Community – Salesforce uses a learning community of Salesforce experts who can answer questions. It also provides training videos and even certification programs. These are essential because they allow customers to access this information at any time, without having to contact customer support.
-A Technical Support Team –Salesforce is flexible and has a world-class support team that can tailor features to your specific needs. You can create customizable reports even without the help of their developers.
Other features:
– Automatic email and meeting tracking
– Social media and email support
– Enterprise-level security and round-the-clock support
– Provides communities and marketplaces for sales and leads.
– Salesforce makes it easy to forecast and keep customers engaged at all times.
– Provides real-time discussion, analysis, and visualization capabilities.
– Customer service tools via email, phone, live chat, social media and self-service help center.
– Lightning App Builder allows companies to create custom applications within the Salesforce platform using pre-built templates and a drag-and-drop interface.
– Email data is automatically synchronized with CRM to create contact profiles.
– Integration with popular business applications such as Dropbox, Zapier and Active Campaign.
– Custom display options for transaction and opportunity management.
Plan Upgrades
As your business grows, you can upgrade your plans for more functionality, including automatic lead scoring and collaborative forecasting for cross-team strategy development. Tools for creating product catalogs, quotes, contracts, and sales orders easily accommodate a growing customer base or product line.
Salesforce is available in three cloud-based editions, called Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, or Marketing Cloud. All Salesforce service plans include an extensive collection of training resources and access to a user-based customer support community for public troubleshooting and resolution.
Pros:
– It provides you with a custom dashboard and reports that allow companies to display only the metrics they want to see.
– The navigation of the software is very simple and easy.
– It offers a wide range of tools and features to organize and sort contacts, track leads, and even predict the conversion rate of promising leads.
– It is cloud-based and allows for automation of activities.
– High level of automation and customization
– Compatible with Linux, Windows, Mac, Android.
– Provides enterprise territory management, sales CRM and social media management.
– The mobile app allows users to perform almost all the same functions as the web app.
– Mass emailing option to help you save time and effort with a wide range of email templates to choose from.
– Integrated Einstein Lead Scoring.
– Compatible with all devices, including cell phones.
– Offers partner communities.
– Integrated process creation and lead generation tools.
– A wide range of third-party integrations.
– 24/7 customer support via phone, email, and tickets.
– Multi-language and multi-currency customer support.
– Free 30-day trial period.
Cons:
– Cannot be used by companies that want an on-premise deployment.
– Live chat support is not available.
– Relatively inexpensive
– No free plan available and generally more expensive than competitors.
– Salesforce has a steep learning curve.
– Customization is expensive and requires a dedicated team to manage.
– Configuration is not intuitive due to the many features and buttons available.
– Many features are paid for, so the monthly subscription cost can increase significantly.
Pricing:
Essentials start at $25/month per user (annual billing).
Professional at $75/month/user
Enterprise at $150/ month per user
Ultimate plan costs $300/month/user (both billed annually)
– Free trial: 30 days
Best for:
Salesforce is an ideal CRM software solution for growing small businesses that want a system that can grow with them.
3. Zoho
Zoho CRM is a powerful and easy-to-use cloud-based business management software that caters to different types of businesses, regardless of their size, to help them organize contacts, market their brand, manage sales, provide customer support, and more. Zoho CRM offers a wide range of marketing and sales features, including lead generation, website visitor tracking, lead scoring, sales signals with contextual lead notifications, and more than 40 in-house sales applications of online productivity tools.
Zoho CRM helps you automate complex sales and marketing workflows, email marketing, forecasting, lead generation, scoring, and full marketing campaigns. However, some of the most advanced features are only included in the Professional and Enterprise editions.
Key features of Zoho CRM:
– Multi-channel contact management (email, phone, live chat, and social media).
– AI voice assistant to create intelligent dashboards and predict business trends.
– Sales automation tools to manage leads, with lead scoring so you can prioritize and convert leads faster.
– Customizable dashboards and reports with multiple options to compare, contrast and learn from your data.
– Detailed analytical reports that allow you to make data-driven decisions.
– Zoho CRM mobile app – allows you to access your CRM data, schedule tasks, connect with customers and update information, even when you’re offline. You can record calls, customer visits, emails, and other activities directly in the app, and attach voice notes and files for later retrieval and review. The mobile app even includes Zoho CRM’s artificial intelligence tool, Zia, which you can use to create new customer records, add notes to existing records, change the status of a record or initiate phone calls.
– Team collaboration tools- This tool has an internal chat feature as well as forums, notes, and groups to facilitate effective team collaboration.
-Integrations with other applications – Zoho CRM integrates seamlessly with more than 400 applications, including HubSpot, MailChimp, Google G Suite, and Zoho’s cloud solutions.
– AI-powered sales assistant – Zoho helps teams and salespeople make decisions based on customer profile and detect anomalies.
– Performance management – With features like gamification, reporting, sales forecasting, and territory management, you can get the most out of your small business spend.
– Sales support – Helps you generate quotes and access sales scripts.
– Process Management – Allows the team to map each step of the sales process with processing rules and sales builders.
– Social media tools – Zoho dispose of social media tools and integrations for publishing, scheduling and managing social media content on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
– Integrations with Zoho Finance Suite for quote and order processing.
– The business card scanner – scanner integrated with the mobile application synchronizes contact information with the CRM database.
– Remote management capabilities with Cliq and Meeting integrations for online meetings.
Pros:
-Easy integration with other Zoho tools and over 400 third-party integrations including LinkedIn, Zapier, email integrations like Google and Outlook, etc.
– Advanced security features such as encryption, audit logs, IP restrictions, and two-factor authentication with customizable user access to ensure data security, integrity, and regulatory compliance.
– A mobile CRM application to stay ahead of the competition and in touch with your customers anytime, anywhere.
– Extensive system customization capabilities
– Automation capabilities to create workflow tasks, navigate the customer journey and communicate with prospects.
-The software can search social media and LinkedIn to capture new customer contacts, scan business cards, and provide information about potential customers.
-The software enables social media and LinkedIn searches to capture new customer contacts, scans business cards and provides automated workflows to assist sales teams.
– Omnichannel customer support via phone, live chat, email and social media.
– Highly scalable.
– Multi-language capability.
– Enables global calendar management.
– Data import/export.
– Predictive selling feature to help with data enrichment, email sentiment analysis, etc.
– 24-hour support for premium users.
– Offers a free plan for up to 3 users.
– Free 15-day trial period.
Cons:
– Free edition is limited to 3 users and has very limited functionality.
– Does not offer onsite solutions.
– Free support is not available after hours, Monday through Friday.
– Free offer is for three users only.
-Paid plans can be expensive
Pricing :
Free plan – Zoho CRM has a free option, making it affordable for solopreneurs and small businesses. However, the free plan is limited to a maximum of 3 users with minimal functionality.
– Standard: $14/month, per user (annual billing).
– Professional: $23 per user, per month
– Enterprise: $40 per user, per month
– Ultimate: $52 per user, per month [Exclusive 30-day trial].
– Custom Quote: On-demand, with enhanced security, implementation, integration and training.
Best for:
Zoho CRM is the best option for businesses that use social media marketing heavily.
4. Pipedrive
Pipedrive is one of the most popular CRM software on the market focused on sales management, designed to be simple and fast by using AI to automate repetitive tasks and manage leads and sales. Its visual pipeline supports more complex sales processes, as you can easily enter and edit your data entries in a simple view.
With its pipeline management feature and clean visual interface, you get an overview of your entire sales pipeline process, a critical feature for generating leads, tracking transactions and activities from first contact to close, and increasing productivity. In addition to pipeline management with a clear, visual interface, you also get email integration, sales reporting, and forecasting, and mobile apps to access your CRM from anywhere.
Pipedrive does not offer segmentation, but it is simple enough to make it easy to identify prospects and maintain relationships. Pipedrive offers a very useful free trial plan that you can test first.
Key features of Pipedrive:
– Visual Sales Pipeline – This allows you to get a complete overview of your pipeline, organize it, and create custom stages (hot, warm, cold) by rep or team member. Its drag-and-drop interface allows you to easily perform essential tasks such as adding contacts or moving transactions between stages.
Lead management – Pipedrive allows you to track leads and sales from forms, chatbots, feeding them directly into the pipeline where they won’t be overlooked 24/7.
– Mobile apps – with iOS and Android mobile apps, you have access to the visual pipeline and can integrate your smartphone with other sales apps to increase sales.
– Mobile alerts and email reminders
– Over 150 integrations, including Google Apps, Zapier, Slack and Microsoft Teams, etc.
– APIs for easy integration with any software
– Email integrations to keep your business communication centralized.
– Email templates
– Sales forecasting and trend analysis
– Backups and encryption to keep your data safe.
– Drag and drop tasks as customers follow the sales funnel
– Calendar integration
– Import and export data
– It can be customized, supports multiple environments with 24/7 support.
– Communication Tracking – A comprehensive contact history tracks calls, emails, chats, etc. and allows you to set your calendar in real-time.
– Integrated document management tools for tracking quotes, proposals, and collecting electronic signatures.
– AI sales assistant gives reps tips to improve their performance based on past customer behavior and CRM data. –
Easy integration with your other programs, such as email, Google Drive, OneDrive, etc. as well as with Xero, QuickBooks, Paycove, PayKickstart, and RoyPay for invoicing and payment processing.
Customizable reports – Metrics measure business performance against goals.
support and resources – Pipedrive offers blogs and support to enhance your skills with the program, as well as broader educational articles on sales, business development, management, and employee motivation.
– Integrated appointment scheduling tool sends calendar links to prospects via live chat, then syncs meetings with the sales rep’s calendar via Pipedrive Scheduler.
Pros:
– Easy to set up, use, and track
– The user interface is simple, highly visual, and straightforward, designed to help the customer move through the sales process.
– It has several customizable pipelines allowing you to easily add transactions, values, win probabilities, and closing dates, as well as email application integration.
– Unlimited custom fields allow you to collect any piece of customer information.
– A wide range of third-party integrations for accounting, marketing, and task management activities.
– Massive lead import capabilities from spreadsheets or other CRMs such as Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zoho.
– Activity reports track sales calls, emails, demos, and individual events.
– Lead source data reports to show you where your leads are coming from (organic, direct, SEM, social, outbound sales, etc.).
– The sales assistant creates performance tips and automation recommendations to save you time.
Cons:
– There is no internal emailing platform.
– Doesn’t offer a free offer
– Additional features like email, phone, team management, goal setting and revenue forecasting tools are only available with paid plans.
– The price is a bit steep.
Pricing :
Pipedrive has no free option, and offers four paid plans with a 14-day free trial:
– Essential: $12.50 per user per month billed annually, and $15 billed monthly.
– Advanced: $24.90 per user per month billed annually, and $29 per month.
– Professional: $49.90 per user, per month, billed annually, and $59 per month.
– Enterprise: $99 per user, per month (10 user minimum) billed annually.
– Free Trial: 14 days of full access are available for Essential, Advanced, and Professional plans.
Best for:
Pipedrive is one of the best choices for companies with a simple direct sales model looking for a system that integrates well with their existing technology.
5. Freshworks
Freshworks CRM (previously Freshsales) is a multi-functional web-based CRM software that offers a variety of CRM software solutions for businesses, such as marketing automation, sales pipeline management, customer service, and service uses AI to help organize and evaluate leads and collaboration tools in an easy to use platform.
Freshworks CRM designed for businesses of all sizes offers solutions to automatically capture your website visitors and group them based on their engagement on your site, assign them to the right sales managers on your team, and track business through customized pipelines. The platform also allows you to create email campaigns, create sign-up forms and communicate with your team and customers through various channels.
It has a truly impressive list of features, including an advanced AI tool, nicknamed “Freddy,” that allows you to dynamically evaluate prospects to determine which ones are most likely to buy.
Key Features:
Intuitive, user-friendly interface – the software has an intuitive, user-friendly interface on desktop and mobile, providing quick access to customer records and communications. The software’s dashboard displays a variety of charts and graphs so you can easily interpret the data and find trends your business can build on.
– Lead Management – The CRM provides customizable web forms to capture lead data from your company’s website and solutions to convert potential leads into customers; ideal for small businesses looking to expand their customer base.
– Business Management – Gives you a complete picture of the company’s position in the sales funnel. It also helps you manage and organize each stage of the funnel and maximize your chances of conversion.
– Lead tracking and evaluation – With the built-in artificial intelligence feature, you can rank and evaluate leads, and identify those most likely to make a purchase.
– Automatic lead attribution – The solution also organizes your contacts and can be configured to automatically send emails to targeted audiences as part of campaigns.
– Smartforms (web-to-lead) – Freshworks CRM allows you to create web forms that automatically record contact information for new leads.
-Many customization options – Freshworks CRM offers many customization options for its modules. You can create custom fields to manage sales activities as well as the metrics that the platform will track.
– Supported currencies and languages can also be changed, and the same goes for user roles in the platform.
-Advanced analytics – To monitor sales activities and campaign performance, Freshworks CRM is equipped with advanced analytics tools that provide insights.
-Integration with third-party tools – Third-party tools like Gmail and Outlook are also easily integrated, allowing you to create grouped email templates while monitoring communications sent and received by prospects. Businesses can also use the built-in calling feature to automatically update customer records.
-Built-in phone options – include call recording, call forwarding, conference calling and a widget that allows you to make calls directly from the Freshworks sales page. With these tools, you can see which products are finding the most success in your market, pinpoint traffic highlights on your websites, and assess prospects’ propensity to buy.
-Artificial Intelligence Tool – Its artificial intelligence tool complements Freddy AI, with predictive contact scores, transaction insights, and intelligent chatbots.
–Freshworks Academy – With the Freshworks Academy, you can improve your knowledge and get certified. In addition to the training academy and blogs, customer support is at your fingertips.
Pros:
-Freshworks Marketplace gives you access to the most popular add-ons among users.
– Provides high-level automation and intelligent workflows.
– Wide range of integrations including MailChimp, Zapier, Calendar, Piesync, Segment, etc.
– Behavior-based lead segmentation, powered by intelligent data metrics.
– Advanced lead scoring based on characteristics and behavior.
– Excellent customer support by phone and email.
– Excellent mobile application
– Event tracking (tracks previous communications to plan future approach).
– Free 21-day trial period.
Cons:
-Software is limited to 200 emails per day per user for the lowest payment plan.
-Limited lead generation tools
– Third-party integrations are limited, which can increase the cost of finding additional platforms.
Pricing:
Freshworks CRM plans are available at multiple price points, including sales-only and marketing-only, so you only pay for the features you need.
Free: It offers a free version suitable for solo users, with only 100 contacts allowed.
Freshworks Growth starts at $15 per user per month (if billed annually). And gives you access to lots of features such as:
1000 marketing contacts, Freddy AI, Web forms, website tracking, integrated phone, and email integration, as well as a mobile app, Lists and segments, drag and drop journey builder, visual sales pipeline, collaboration with Slack, 20 workflows, 5 sales sequences Custom reports and dashboards, Migration from other CRMs, Freshdesk integration.
Pro plan at $39 per user per month (if billed annually).
Enterprise plan at $69 per user per month (if billed annually).
Support: Phone and email
Best for:
Freshworks CRM free plan is one of the best CRM choices for solopreneurs and medium-sized startups.
6. Nimble
Nimble is a famous CRM software developed for professionals and businesses to build a better customer-client relationship in the multi-environment world by combining contacts, emails, and social media interactions in one place. It allows you to update contacts, easily access company and contact information, and manage transactions from your workflow, among other impressive features.
Its user-friendly interface and colorful dashboards provide you with a to-do list, show you the best offers to monitor, engage and grow business relationships, allow you smart integration with social media and over 160 third-party applications to combine your contact data into one platform. It also features a “rules engine” that allows Nimble to predict relevant contacts and activities based on user behavior.
Users can set reminders to stay in touch with certain users and mark certain communications as important to stay ahead of the game.
Key Features:
– Nimble’s features are largely focused on contact lists, so it has many tools for communication and interaction.
– Call recording
– Group messaging
– Task reminders
– Contact management
– Social profile matching
– Social media signals
– Calendar and email synchronization
– Two-way synchronization with over 160 integrations
– Relationship management – helps you automatically combine and group social media connections, communications, inboxes, and calendar appointments.
– Live Profiles – accessible and actionable contact records to quickly retrieve contact information and interaction history.
– Segmentation – helps you stay organized by segmenting your contacts into lists to take various actions.
– Reminder function – never miss an opportunity with pre-programmed reminder functions.
– Pipeline management – stay on top of every step of the sales funnel with visual pipeline representation.
– you can assign a task to anyone with better sales pipeline tracking and reporting.
– API, custom fields, email signature capture, Smart App, group messages, etc.
In terms of storage, its single-tier plan offers only 2GB per user, but more data can be purchased if needed.
Pros:
– It provides an excellent chrome plugin and automatically aggregates social accounts, so manual efforts are reduced to a great extent.
– Contact registration feature – helps you collect contact and lead information across multiple channels in one unified profile.
Suitable for social media channels such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, it allows you to aggregate messages in one place so that you have instant, real-time visibility into how people are interacting with your brand.
– It provides a centralized location for emails, CRM-related data, and a calendar.
– It includes a convenient list building and mass emailing feature to help you engage your audience at scale.
– Email tracking helps engage customers/leads more effectively.
– Wide range of third-party integrations, such as Gmail, Outlook, HubSpot, Mailchimp, etc.
– Offers a redesigned smart contacts application (enhanced widget to support calendars, tasks, offers, etc.)
– Highly scalable and customizable.
– 14-day free trial.
– Extended task management to create and assign tasks to different team members.
– Compatible with cell phones.
– Ensures data security, integrity, and GDPR compliance.
-Integration with Office 365 and G Suite, so you can quickly import and organize contacts from the platform you already use.
-Social listening and engagement tools help you find and generate new leads.
Data organization, sales pipeline, and reporting features keep your operations on track.
Cons:
– It lacks a good email editor.
It lacks many of the more complex organizational features, such as custom fields.
– It only comes with one pipeline, which is a major drawback.
– There is no free plan.
– Many integrations require a synchronization tool to work properly.
Pricing :
Nimble Business plan is $25 per user/month, billed monthly and $19 per month (billed annually).
It only manages 25,000 contacts, which means Nimble will lose value in the long run for growing teams. 2GB storage per user
Best for:
Nimble CRM is a good choice for startups or small businesses at the beginning of their growth plan to generate organic and valuable leads, especially through social media.
7. Streak
Streak is a great CRM software that works with G Suite and free Gmail accounts and allows you to send bulk emails, track emails and customer leads, manage contacts and track your sales funnels right from your Gmail inbox. Because Streak CRM is integrated directly with Gmail, you can take advantage of integration with other Google Workspace applications such as Sheets, Docs, Drive, and Chat to help you keep all your data accessible and in one place.
This tool also allows you to automatically capture leads directly from your contacts, add tasks and reminders, schedule emails, create custom pipelines, set tasks and reminders, and more.
Key Features:
Streak CRM software comes with workflow features like hiring, project management, sales, support, and more, but you can also customize it to your exact needs. Since it is integrated directly with Gmail, it is very easy to use even for complete beginners. This easy CRM software is available as a browser add-on or mobile app for iOS and Android.
– It supports third-party integrations via Gmail and Zapier.
– You can track all your contacts in a custom pipeline.
– Easily import and export data.
– Mail merge to easily send mass emails.
Pros:
-import and export data easily.
– Integrated directly into Gmail, Streak has desktop and mobile apps with all G Suite integrations.
– The platform’s email integration automatically captures data from your contacts and emails while receiving notifications at every stage of your pipeline progress.
– Easily update your customers and contacts and create and save effective and beautiful email templates.
-Free plan available
Cons:
Streak works as a Chrome extension, so when you switch devices, you have to download and install it again.
Paid versions are priced comparably to more comprehensive CRMs.
Pricing:
Streak CRM has a free plan with limited functionality.
Solo plan is $15/user/month.
Pro plan is $49/user/month, with annual billing with a 14-day free trial.
Enterprise plan is $129/user/month, with annual billing.
Best for:
If you already use Gmail or Google Workspace, Streak is the easiest CRM to integrate for your small business.
8. Insightly
Insightly CRM is a modern CRM platform that can help you grow your business faster by offering a useful matchmaking feature that gives context on how contacts are connected. The platform is known for its seamless integration between CRM features and assigning tasks to team members via handy task lists.
Insightly CRM software allows you to automatically create workflows from the customer information it collects to trigger actions such as sending an email reminder or adding a new record to the database, to ensure you don’t miss any important steps in the sales process.
Key Features:
– Lead Routing – the software tracks the most relevant lead information, including a rich timeline of activity from the source of the marketing campaign, emails, phone calls, meetings.
– Relationship Management – Build strong relationships with existing customers and attract new ones.
– Extensive third-party integrations – Integrated with a wide range of applications like Gmail, Mailchimp, Dropbox, Outlook, etc.
– Pipeline Management – This allows you to monitor the performance of the sales team, track the sales pitch and identify exactly where it is in the sales funnel.
Pros:
– User-friendly, visual dashboards to view and track important metrics to provide a real-time macro and micro view of your business without a learning curve.
– Its sidebar works as a handy Chrome extension, allowing you to save Gmail messages directly into your CRM so you can easily cross-reference contact information.
-Available in web and mobile versions for Android and iOS, it also integrates with G Suite and Microsoft Office 365.
– Built-in automated email reminders and tracking.
– Ensures data integrity and GDPR compliant regulatory compliance.
– Highly flexible calendars and events.
– Offers highly scalable and customizable features to ensure effective screening and tagging is possible.
– Customer support is available via phone, tickets, and email.
– Built-in tutorials for hands-on experience using the software.
– Free 14-day trial.
Cons:
– The free version of Insightly does not include a data backup system, contains daily caps for massive email blasts and artificial intelligence and predictive tools are only available on the paid plans.
– The number of custom fields for contacts is capped at 25.
– Lacks live chat support and on-site deployment.
– Supports only one language (English).
Pricing:
Plus plan is $29 per user/per month, billed annually.
Professional plan is $49 per user/per month, billed annually.
Enterprise plan is $99 per user/per month, billed annually.
A 14-day free trial is available for both Plus and Professional plans.
Best for:
Insightly is a great choice for small teams and solopreneurs who want to manage the details of the sales process.
9. Keap
Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) is an advanced sales CRM software and marketing automation platform, including cloud-based lead capture, customer billing, contact management, and e-commerce tools for all types of businesses. Keap’s combination of sales and marketing tools helps you manage all your customer activity and communications in one place.
Key Features:
– Contact Management – This is a platform for creating a customized sales and marketing process while allowing you to sort contacts into segmented lists that will help you send the right message to the right people.
– Project management – allows you to efficiently manage all projects on the same platform with features such as drag and drop task lists and more.
– Appointment scheduling – You can share your calendar online and automate appointment scheduling, invitations, and follow-ups.
– Email marketing –You can send professional emails, newsletters, customize them, track and analyze results. Keap also offers email templates and list segmentation tools to help you send messages to the right audience at the right time,
– The scheduling tool – Scheduling software makes it easy to organize meetings, and email synchronization with Gmail and Outlook helps you centralize communications into one organized system.
– An evolving CRM – Keap evolves as your business grows. So you can easily add additional functionality to the CRM as the need arises.
– SMS marketing – Its new feature, automated SMS marketing, allows you to set up SMS responses that are automatically generated when a customer fills out a Web form, for example.
– Customized forms – Keap offers functionality to create custom forms and integrate them into a website or landing pages.
– The Integrated Reporting Tool – The integrated reporting tool allows you to track campaign effectiveness and customer engagement.
– Payment Form Tool- Keap can help small businesses create customizable payment forms to collect payments from customers without sending a full invoice to simplify their sales process.
– Live chat support – Keap offers live chat support and an extensive online library of helpful resources, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In addition, phone and email support are available on weekdays.
– Free Data Migration – Keap’s migration team will help you transfer your company’s data from many popular CRMs to Keap for free.
Pros:
– Keap offers a fully customizable contact management and sales pipeline platform for small businesses, freelancers, and e-commerce.
– Cloud-based, inexpensive, and easy to implement.
– Allows integration with programs like PayPal.
– Offers multi-chat windows, easy data entry, and workflow automation.
– Comprehensive email tracking to help you gain critical insights into your email marketing campaign.
– Extensive third-party integrations with social, billing, messaging, and customer support applications.
– Telephony functionality allows you to make one-click calls, create call scripts and automate voicemail.
– The mobile marketing feature allows you to send personalized SMS messages and use mobile messaging in campaigns.
– Helps you create dynamic landing pages to attract and engage potential leads.
– Offers excellent exit intent pop-ups (converts visitors who abandon using them).
– Extensive customer support via phone, email, live chats, and tickets.
– Highly scalable, customizable, and user-friendly.
– Offers a free plan for up to 10 users.
Cons:
– Keap is an expensive tool.
– Integrations are limited.
– Does not support on-premise deployment.
– Supports only one language (English).
– 24/5 customer support (only available Monday through Friday).
Pricing :
Lite plan is $79 per user/per month, billed monthly.
Pro plan is $169 per user/per month, billed monthly.
The Max plan is $199 per user per month, billed monthly.
A free trial is available for both the Lite and Pro plans.
Best for:
Keap is a great choice for solopreneurs and small businesses who don’t have a lot of time to spend on their own.
10. Salesflare
Salesflare is an intuitive and easy-to-use CRM software dedicated to sales. that gives you total control over your sales by providing powerful visual pipelines and insights as well as collecting data from social media, company databases, sending personal email sequences on a large scale for startups and small B2B companies.
It automatically keeps itself updated by automatically gathering all the information you need. You can launch Salesflare with a few clicks, use it on desktop, mobile, or from the sidebar of your mailbox to generate more sales even if you have little data, to begin with. It can be integrated with over 400 other productivity tools like Trello and Mailchimp.
Key Features:
– Visual, drag-and-drop sales pipelines – You can create as many pipelines as you want and get a clear overview of your sales pipeline, update it quickly and track progress.
– Email and Website Tracking – You can track emails sent from Gmail, Outlook, and Salesflare to see how your customers are interacting with your emails and what they are reading on your website.
– Email Signature Synchronization – The tool automatically detects and interprets signatures to update your contacts.
– Automatic enrichment of company and contact data – By typing the name of a company, the tool automatically collects company profile information with publicly available information such as emails, LinkedIn profiles, etc.
– Email templates and workflows – Templates in Salesflare and Gmail, powered by hotkeys and merge fields allow you to automate repetitive emails using. By setting up an email workflow, files exchanged with customers are automatically sorted and tracked.
– Automated reminders – Salesflare provides automation features like address books, calendars, and automated emailing in one place. It records and classifies meetings and calls to keep you organized and sends notifications to let you know who sent you a message and from which channel.
– Business Card Scanner – With its built-in scanner, you can take a picture of the business cards you receive and its AI will extract all contact information in seconds.
– Ready-to-use dashboards – As soon as you launch, its tool automatically starts processing your data and extracting information and places sales opportunities in an easy-to-read dashboard.
– Task suggestions – the tool can automatically generate to-do lists to help you stay productive.
– Salesflare offers collaboration features.
– It is seamlessly integrated with all your tools.
– It provides personal and quality support via chat and email.
Pros:
– Salesflare offers good automation features that do a lot of the work of importing your data into the platform and automatically logs every interaction with your contacts, whether it’s via email, phone, or chat, which can reduce data entry time significantly.
– Go-live is much faster compared to competing CRMs.
– Contact information is collected and automatically updated
-It is a useful tool for data sharing and team collaboration that can work directly in your Outlook or Gmail accounts.
– It shows you which opportunities should be prioritized.
Reminders and follow-ups help reduce the number of forgotten customers.
– technical advice is available.
Cons:
– Salesflare at its base price, is a bit more expensive than other small business CRMs.
-The limited number of integrations
– Does not offer on-site deployment.
– Only supports English language software.
Pricing :
Salesflare offers three paid plans: Growth, Pro, and Enterprise.
The growth plan is $29 per user/per month, billed annually.
Most features are available in the Growth plan, with the exception of email sequences, permissions, and custom dashboards.
Pro plan is $49 per user per month, billed annually.
Enterprise plan is $99 per user per month, billed annually.
Salesflare offers a free trial. You can try it directly on the website.
Best for:
Salesflare is one of the best CRM software choices for startups and small to medium-sized businesses.
Conclusion
CRM software can help your business with many essential tasks, including sales and marketing workflow automation, contact information management, email campaigns, and more. I hope that by reviewing the key features of the best CRM software listed here, while considering which features will be most beneficial for your type of business, your business goals, and the industry in which you operate, you will be able to choose one for your business.
How to Set Up Email Automation Workflows?
By setting up email automation workflows in your email marketing efforts, you can send automated promotional messages to your subscribers that save you time and