There are some people who do not believe that small businesses require CRMs in the long run. However, it is a common misunderstanding that CRMs are exclusively utilized by big companies or fast-growing startups; but this misconception is incorrect.
Small business owners and employees, who have multiple roles, seek solutions that will empower them to address various challenges and aid in their growth.
In this blog, we will discuss what a CRM tool is and how it can benefit you and your team as a small business. The tool helps eliminate unnecessary details and fosters strong client relationships.
What is a CRM for small business?
CRM, which is an acronym for customer relationship management, refers to software that effectively stores and arranges customer data in a centralized location, enabling the monitoring of individual customers.
By utilizing a CRM platform, you have the ability to access and review all past interactions, allowing you to familiarize yourself before contacting a customer. This capability enhances the customer experience, as it enables you to make each interaction intentional and personal.
Is a CRM useful for small businesses?
In summary: indeed.
A CRM system can be the deciding factor in the success or failure of small businesses when it comes to providing excellent customer service, as 76% of customers would discontinue their relationship with a company after a negative experience.
Despite the potential for increased efficiency in business operations, it is crucial to utilize a CRM effectively. Certain businesses may prioritize lead management, sales, and disregard the various other functions of a small business CRM, which serves as a comprehensive hub for client information and interactions.
CRMs enhance businesses’ ability to track data and customize the overall customer experience, resulting in enhanced sales, revenue, and customer loyalty.
The perfect CRM software should offer more than mere sales tracking by integrating your marketing and customer service teams with the sales team, thereby ensuring a comprehensive understanding of the customer’s complete journey.
The best CRM for small business you can buy today
- Salesforce
Ideal for advanced customization
Salesforce is renowned for its expertise in managing enterprise-level businesses as the market-leading CRM giant. However, it also provides solutions for small businesses.
Salesforce offers competitive plans for smaller businesses with its Small Business Pricing Solutions, providing an all-in-one solution to your sales, service, and marketing needs. For just $25 per user a month, the Essentials package offers both sales and customer service in one simple app, enabling smaller businesses to access market-leading CRM at a reduced price.
The Salesforce interface is sales-focused and easy to use. You have the option to customize features such as dashboards and reports to suit your business requirements and personalize your user experience. In addition, the CRM offers various tools to simplify your sales and business processes, including on-screen calls for internal communication, the ability to create a client knowledge base easily, data export, email templates, and integration with third-party tools like Slack.
- Freshsales
The top choice for smaller businesses in terms of versatility.
Freshsales offers a range of tools that enable small- and mid-sized businesses to provide customer support, comprehend customer intentions, and effectively convert leads into sales.
The Freshsales suite, which incorporates the Freshworks automation software, is a comprehensive CRM software that brings together sales and marketing.
Freshsales uses the intelligent Freddy AI assistant to offer clear insights into customer engagement, enabling businesses to identify leads, finalize deals, and foster client relationships. Moreover, the software features an intuitive and user-friendly interface, accessible on both desktop and mobile devices, that allows for quick access to client records and communication.
You can also integrate third-party tools such as Gmail and Outlook with ease, enabling you to create bulk email templates and monitor both sent and received communications to prospective clients. Moreover, businesses can make use of the built-in call feature to automatically update client records.
Although the CRM does not have lead generation tools such as business card scanners, it offers customizable web forms that allow smaller businesses to capture lead data from their websites, making it a great solution for those seeking to expand their client base.
- Zoho CRM
Ideal for users who already have the Zoho suite.
Zoho CRM is a well-equipped cloud-based software that offers excellent tools for customer management and lead generation, making it suitable for running a small business.
The platform is highly user-friendly yet remains powerful, offering features such as social media and LinkedIn search functions for acquiring new customer contacts, business card scanning, and automated workflows to aid sales teams. Additionally, it provides reporting, client contact and communication records, website visitor segmentation, and pipeline management for added benefits.
Although there are various advantages to the CRM, the most notable one is its ability to integrate smoothly with other Zoho tools such as Zoho sales, marketing, and project management suite, Zoho Invoice, and Zoho Campaigns. Despite the potentially high cost of Zoho CRM, it offers a free plan and a $ 14-a-month plan, which may be sufficient for the requirements of smaller businesses.
- HubSpot
The best option to consider is a free plan when thinking in a systematic manner.
HubSpot is suitable for small businesses that are in the initial stages and need a CRM solution. In addition to the available paid plans, there is also a free option available for the CRM software, which is both lightweight and efficient.
By utilizing the free HubSpot CRM, users can take advantage of excellent client database software that helps in the management and upkeep of new leads. This software provides dashboard reporting, company insights, deal tracking, and pipeline management, all of which are easily accessible through the user-friendly interface.
You have access to a variety of free tools to help you organize your customer journey. These tools include email tracking and templates, on-screen calling, and contact management. Additionally, there is integration available with over 300 third-party apps such as Slack and lead-generation software.
If you want to upgrade from the free plan, you can choose either the Sales Hub or the Marketing Hub, which both have a starting price of $45 per month for two users. These plans also offer extra features such as task automation notifications and conversation routing.
- Streak CRM for Gmail
Ideal for individuals already using Gmail and Google Workspace.
Streak, being integrated directly into Gmail, is the easiest CRM to implement into the daily operations of your small business for current users of Gmail and Google Workspace. It allows you to work from your inbox and provides seamless integration with other Google Workspace apps such as Sheets, Docs, Drive, and Chat, ensuring that all your data is easily accessible and consolidated.
Streak CRM enables you to conveniently keep track of client emails, manage contacts, monitor leads, and stay updated with your sales funnel. With this tool, you have the capability to directly capture leads from your contacts, effortlessly import or export data, create customized pipelines, and set tasks and reminders, among other functionalities. Additionally, you can easily track and share client interactions.
Streak CRM offers affordable options for both individual professionals and small teams or businesses. With a forever-free plan, individuals can access basic CRM features at no cost. Additionally, the Solo basic plan starts at $15 a month, catering to the needs of single professionals. Nonetheless, for larger teams, the premium Pro plan is available starting at $49 per user a month, which can result in higher expenses.
- Pipedrive
Optimizing for user experience is the most favorable approach.
The price ranges from $14-99 per user.
Pipedrive is designed as a customer relationship management (CRM) solution that caters to small businesses. Its main objective is to help businesses prioritize their visual sales pipeline. It offers a drag-and-drop feature that ensures a prompt response to important tasks. Additionally, it allows users to customize pipelines and fields, making it easier to align with existing systems and enhance processes. Furthermore, the mobile app permits seamless interaction with customers and team members, regardless of location.
Advantages:
- Helpful mobile CRM apps
- 24/7 email and chat support
- Simple, visual user interface
Drawbacks:
- Lacks an internal emailing platform
- Functionality is limited to the price
- No free plan
- Insightly
Project management is most effective when planned in a sequential manner, ensuring each step is carefully considered and executed.
Insightly is a CRM platform that enables you to manage all your sales activities. It allows you to establish personalized workflows for your sales deals and monitor their progression towards completion. Furthermore, it enables you to produce tasks for other users in your organization to handle by creating or modifying records.
Insightly enables the sending of emails to leads and customers directly from the platform by integrating with email clients. This feature allows for tracking the delivery of emails and provides essential data, including open and click-through rates.
As the owner of a business, you possess significant authority in determining your staff’s actions on this CRM. You have the ability to establish specific permissions and visibility levels for every user, based on their role or department. For instance, ordinary employees might not have access to detailed sales reports, whereas executives do.
Insightly offers the advantage of using workflow automation to streamline various sales tasks. For instance, you have the ability to configure it to automatically send an email when a lead reaches a particular stage in your deal. Additionally, it can also update your sales forecast automatically once a deal is closed. These are only a few examples of how your sales team can effectively utilize their time. While creating these workflow automations may necessitate some technical proficiency, the complexity level is less than that of traditional programming.
Insightly’s extensive integrations with third-party tools are often praised by customers, making it unrivaled in this category. By linking your Insightly CRM profile with numerous other tools, you can enhance its functionality. For instance, you can sync employee records from your BambooHR account with corresponding user profiles on Insightly or automatically capture customer details from your online Shopify store and incorporate them into Insightly.
The primary disadvantage we have found is that Insightly requires additional payment for phone support, unlike most competitors. If you opt not to pay, you will be limited to email support, which is considerably slower than phone support.
- Workbooks
The optimal option for monitoring sales.
Workbooks is a CRM suitable for small businesses, allowing you to conveniently manage sales and customer engagement in a unified platform. It facilitates the recording and monitoring of sales activities, ensuring that no aspect goes unnoticed.
Workbooks excels in contact management, allowing you to seize insights and establish connections through every interaction with your leads or customers. Additionally, you can effectively categorize customers based on various criteria and improve engagement with each respective segment.
This platform offers tools that allow you to closely monitor your business’s finances. For instance, you have the ability to track your suppliers, their prices, and keep a record of all communications with them. Additionally, you can conveniently create supplier contracts within the platform and effectively monitor each one. Similarly, you have the capability to generate professional sales quotes and monitor their fulfillment status when sending them to clients.
The reporting features of Workbooks are where it truly excels. It allows for effortless creation of comprehensive reports that provide valuable understanding of your sales pipeline. These reports are able to pinpoint the market segments and products that generate the highest revenue for you. Furthermore, it enables you to conveniently track the achievement or shortfall of targets for salespeople within your organization.
Unlike a competitor such as Insightly, this platform’s main drawback is its limited integrations with third-party software.
What are the benefits of a CRM for small businesses?
Adopting CRM software provides a company with several benefits, including reducing production costs, enhancing sales revenue, and expanding market share, thus giving it a competitive edge.
To avoid obstructing your employees with unnecessary and disconnected tools, it is crucial to consider their diverse goals.
A good CRM offers several other significant advantages.
- One source of truth for your entire company: Workers routinely waste time searching for information across different tools, leading to discrepancies or inaccuracies and poorer business outcomes. With a CRM, everything you need lives on a single platform.
- Better data and reporting: A CRM aggregates all your sales and customer data into an easily accessible dashboard. With a customizable CRM, you can configure sales dashboards to pull customer data from any board that’s part of your system, from lead and contact management to the sales pipeline and beyond, providing your team with instant performance insights.
- Increased efficiency and productivity: With centralized, accurate data, your team can get more done in less time. They can also make use of workflow automation features to boost efficiency and productivity.
- Lower business expenses: This one’s a no-brainer. When your team can work more efficiently, business expenses decrease. You’ll close deals faster, generate more revenue, and create breathing room to let your business grow.
- Better customer experience: When your sales, marketing, and customer service teams are more engaged, efficient, and productive, customers get a better experience with your team, leading to increased customer loyalty.
Qualities to look out for when choosing a CRM for your small business
When selecting a tool to help your small business grow, there are certain qualities that are essential and cannot be compromised.
- Fully customizable: Your CRM should match your business processes, not the other way around. A good CRM solution will let you manage sales activity, marketing campaigns, and any other facet of your customer experience in a way that makes sense for your business.
- Easy-to-learn: No one wants to spend weeks learning a new tool. The right CRM will have a shallow learning curve to help employees get up to speed as quickly as possible.
- Flexible and adaptable: Whether you need to manage more leads and sales or update your entire pipeline, your CRM should seamlessly adapt to your business. For instance, as you develop your sales funnel, you may find a need for tracking sales documents.
- Collaborative: A good CRM empowers your employees to work well together by providing simple methods of communication between teams, helping them provide the best customer experience. It should also play nicely with your external tools, so you can keep everything in one place.
- Cloud-based: A cloud-based CRM gives you the freedom to access your data from anywhere while also making sure you never run out of storage as you add more leads and customers to your database.
FAQs about CRM for small business
What is the process for selecting a CRM system for a small business?
To select the most suitable CRM for your small business, you should start by identifying your requirements, assessing your budget, studying various options, considering necessary integrations, and ultimately evaluating different systems using complimentary plans or trial versions.
What is the cost of a CRM for small businesses?
The price range for a CRM for small businesses varies greatly depending on the chosen CRM and required features. Certain CRMs provide a plan that is free indefinitely, whereas others offer solely a free trial. Typically, one can anticipate costs ranging from $10 to $100 per user.
Is a CRM beneficial for small businesses?
Indeed, the utilization of a CRM system by small enterprises can facilitate the monitoring of customer interactions, the management of customer information, and the enhancement of marketing and sales approaches. Moreover, an effective CRM system can contribute to the simplification of procedures, the upgrading of customer service, and the establishment of stronger connections with customers.
