It is not a universal assumption that small businesses have a consistent requirement for CRMs. In reality, many people mistakenly believe that CRMs are exclusively utilized by big companies or rapidly expanding startups, but this is completely untrue.
Small business owners and employees have multiple roles and seek solutions to address various challenges with the aim of facilitating their growth.
In this blog post, we will explain the components and benefits of a CRM tool for small businesses. The tool aids in reducing clutter and fostering robust client relationships.
What is a CRM for small business?
CRM is an abbreviation for customer relationship management. In essence, it is a software specifically designed for storing and organizing customer data in one central place, enabling you to easily monitor and manage individual customers.
By utilizing a CRM platform, you have the ability to access past interactions and familiarize yourself with them prior to contacting a customer. This empowers you to provide a superior customer experience by ensuring that each interaction is purposeful and tailored.
Is a CRM useful for small businesses?
To summarize briefly: affirmative.
With 76% of customers willing to discontinue business with a company following a negative experience, the significance of delivering excellent client service remains paramount for businesses of any scale. The success of a small business in this regard heavily relies on the effectiveness of its CRM system.
However, it is important to note that a CRM must be used correctly for it to effectively enhance the efficiency of your business. It is possible for certain businesses to excessively prioritize lead management, generation, or sales, resulting in neglect of the versatility of a CRM designed for small businesses – as it serves as a centralized repository for client interactions and data.
CRMs enhance the customer experience by facilitating data tracking and personalization for businesses, thereby bolstering sales, revenue, and customer loyalty in the process.
The perfect CRM software should go beyond sales tracking by fostering connectivity between marketing and customer service teams, ensuring a comprehensive understanding of the customer’s overall journey.
Best CRM for small businesses in 2023 – Expert review
- Drip
Drip is not only the top eCommerce CRM, but it also serves small businesses exceptionally well. It boasts robust capabilities, a visually appealing interface, and effortless usability for all types of businesses.
With this CRM, creating automation workflows and email campaigns is simple. You can choose to use a visual builder or text builder to construct your emails, both of which are user-friendly.
With Drip, you have access to various features such as easy list segmentation, conversion tracking, content customization, purchase intent marketing, and more. By utilizing tags, events, and custom fields, you can effectively learn and track all essential information about your customers’ stories.
It is an excellent software for maintaining a profitable customer database as it helps in managing contacts effectively.
It is intended to enhance your overall profit and assist you in creating potential customers, organizing contacts, and converting them into loyal clientele.
Drip is equipped with a wide range of features, such as marketing automation, advanced contact management, actionable reports, email campaigns, one-on-one conversations, eCommerce user tracking, and other features.
Drip can be seamlessly integrated with top 3rd-party services such as email services, lead generation software, WooCommerce, Shopify, and others. Additionally, workflows for Facebook and Instagram lead generation are also available.
Key attributes:
- Marketing automation workflows
- Advanced contact management using tags, custom fields, and events
- Native integrations with popular 3rd-party services
- Actionable reports
- Easy email list segmentation
- Content customization
- eCommerce user tracking
- Custom conversion tracking
- Purchase intent marketing
- Automatic revenue attribution
The pricing aspect:
For as low as $39 per month, you can have access to plans that cater to 2500 active contacts, unlimited email sends, and round-the-clock chat and email support. Additionally, there is an option to try Drip-free for a span of 14 days.
- Brevo
Brevo, as a comprehensive CRM, offers all the necessary features for efficient email marketing.
Brevo is an excellent choice for businesses of any size due to its ability to accommodate your growing business and the option to start for free. They provide dependable email delivery, email marketing, automation, transactional emails for eCommerce, smart segmentation, and additional features.
In contrast to other CRMs, they additionally offer SMS marketing and chat features. SMS marketing is an effective strategy that can swiftly enhance sales and engagement. Their live chat solution enables immediate communication with customers and prospects.
With its top-tier support team and detailed documentation, Brevo makes it easy to get started.
Main characteristics:
- Easy segmentation and personalization
- Powerful marketing automation tools
- Transactional emails with reliable delivery
- Landing page and signup form builder
- Easy Facebook ads and retargeting
- Detailed and actionable analytics
- Automatic send-time optimization
- A/B testing
- SMS and Chat marketing tools
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You can begin without any charge!
- HubSpot CRM
When beginning, small businesses searching for a budget-friendly solution will find that HubSpot is undoubtedly the finest CRM option. It excels as a customer database software for effectively overseeing new leads.
HubSpot provides a wide range of CRM tools to manage the customer journey and is user-friendly. It can be categorized as a free CRM since it offers forever-free plans with limited features for its CRM, Marketing, Sales, and Service Hubs.
The CRM offers a pleasant interface that allows you to easily access your complete sales pipeline on your dashboard. If you desire additional data (which is likely), you can access comprehensive information regarding contact and sales activity, detailed reports, and performance from an individual or team perspective.
By employing a clever marketer, you can transform your emails into immediate sales representatives that will boost your profits.
HubSpot offers various features including a mobile app available for iPhone and Android, email templates, real-time notifications, email tracking, scheduling, phone calls, and other functionalities.
Furthermore, it possesses the capability to connect with more than 300 apps and services such as WordPress, email marketing firms, lead generation software like OptinMonster, and others. Additionally, users have the option to link HubSpot with Gmail or Outlook, enabling the automatic logging of activities and the capturing of all email correspondence.
Important characteristics: Some important features:
- Personalize email sequences for leads and existing customers
- Place phone calls right from the CRM
- Get real-time notifications about lead behavior
- Integrate with popular tools like Salesforce, Shopify, and Microsoft Dynamics
- Store unlimited users, customer data, and up to a million contacts
- Integrate 300+ apps
- Create custom filters to sort contacts
- Schedule emails and tasks and create tickets
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The basic CRM software is available at no cost, but if you want access to advanced functionalities, you have the option to upgrade to a paid plan specifically designed for Marketing, Sales, or Service hubs, with prices beginning at $30 per month.
- Constant Contact
Constant Contact is a widely used email marketing service that can also serve as a CRM. It is particularly beneficial for small businesses due to its straightforward and user-friendly dashboard, marketing automation, reporting capabilities, sales funnels, and a convenient drag-and-drop feature for email creation.
With Constant Contact’s extensive marketplace, you can conveniently store contacts, handle customer information, and incorporate various third-party integrations, including eCommerce integrations. The abundance of integrations simplifies the process of creating a tailored platform for your business.
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- Email Scheduling
- Easy list segmentation and list cleaning
- Marketing automation to make lead nurturing a breeze
- Drag and drop builder to easily create stunning emails
- 100+ email templates
- Easy integration with eCommerce platforms
- Run Facebook and Instagram ads to grow your email list
The pricing policy is as follows:
To access all the features that will make this CRM software option convenient, it is advisable to choose the Standard plan which begins at $35 per month rather than the Lite plan at $12 per month.
- Salesflare
When considering popular CRMs, Salesflare is one that should be taken into account as their tagline accurately reflects their aim of increasing sales while reducing the amount of work needed.
The reason for this is that Salesflare is a CRM that enables you to engage with customers, as well as utilize your preferred marketing tools. You can easily begin and increase your sales, even with limited initial data.
This software automatically collects contact information of your leads from social profiles, email signatures, and other public sources. Additionally, it logs all of your meetings and phone calls, eliminating the need for manual data entries and the worry of forgetting.
Important characteristics:
- Contact information is gathered and automatically updated from public sources
- Meetings and calls are recorded and filed to keep you organized
- Files exchanged with customers are automatically sorted and tracked
- Sales opportunities are placed in an easy-to-read dashboard
- Notifications are sent telling you who messaged you and from which channel
- To-do lists are automatically generated to help you stay productive
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The pricing for plans begins at $29/month when paid for annually. Then, the Pro plan is priced at $49/month and the Enterprise plan at $99/month.
- Zoho
Zoho, known for being ideal for startups, provides a comprehensive set of cloud-based software to ensure smooth running of your small business. In addition to robust marketing and sales capabilities, you will have access to SaaS apps and online productivity tools.
This user-friendly CRM software assists small businesses in sorting contacts, promoting their brand, handling sales procedures, offering customer support, and much beyond.
With Zoho CRM, you have the ability to integrate with your existing marketing tools, capture leads from social media, segment visitors, and provide support through the use of built-in live chat.
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- Multichannel contact management (email, phone, live chat, and social media)
- AI voice assistant for creating intelligent dashboards and forecasting business trends
- Sales lead management (with lead scoring) so you can prioritize leads and convert them faster
- Detailed analytics reports so you can make data-driven decisions
- Mobile apps to keep everyone on the same page, even on the go
- Team collaboration tools and team roles
- IT management for monitoring websites and handling support tickets
- Built-in security measures to keep your data safe
The pricing aspect:
Zoho offers a free plan that allows for a maximum of 3 users, however, the paid plans offer more advanced features. The paid plans begin at a rate of $14 per user per month, with yearly billing.
- Pipedrive
Pipedrive is a sales CRM software that is designed to be simple and fast, making it incredibly user-friendly. By utilizing their pipeline management feature, you can have a complete overview of your entire sales management process and maintain control throughout.
You’ll receive email integration, sales reporting and forecasting, and mobile apps along with pipeline management that has a clear, visual interface, enabling you to access your CRM from anywhere.
Although Pipedrive lacks segmentation capabilities, it is sufficiently straightforward to facilitate lead identification and relationship maintenance effortlessly.
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- Mobile alerts and email reminders
- Easy integration with Google Apps, Trello, Zapier, and more
- API for easy integration with any software
- Email integrations to keep your sales communication in one place
- Email templates
- iOS and Android mobile apps
- Sales forecasting and trend analysis
- Backups and encryption to keep your data secure
- Drag and drop tasks as customers follow the sales funnel
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The starting price for plans is $9.90 per user per month, and it is billed on an annual basis.
- Salesforce
Salesforce, an industry leader in CRM, is highly regarded as one of the top choices for small businesses. With Salesforce, you have the capability to guide leads along a customized customer journey. Additionally, the advanced marketing platform enables you to enhance sales via various channels such as emails, SMS messaging, social media, and digital advertising.
Due to Salesforce’s extensive existence, it incorporates a plethora of advanced features and solutions to cater to diverse needs such as sales, marketing, commerce, customer service and engagement, team productivity, and beyond.
Here are the main characteristics:
- Guided onboarding
- Custom dashboards and reports
- Automatically track emails and meetings
- Social media and email support
- Enterprise-level security and ongoing support
The pricing aspect:
Small businesses can subscribe to plans starting at $25/month per user, with billing done annually.
- Freshsales
Freshsales, which is now called Freshworks, is a widely used CRM software suitable for businesses of all sizes. It is user-friendly and provides a sales-focused approach, encompassing all necessary features for optimizing conversions.
The dashboard, which is excellent, provides immediate access to contact management, reports, emails, phone calls, and other features. Additionally, mobile apps are available for sales on the go, in addition to the intuitive web-based interface.
Freshsales employs lead scoring powered by AI to aid in the efficient prioritization of leads with a higher probability of conversion. Additionally, users can establish personalized workflow automation, obtain practical insights from interactions, monitor events, and utilize the comprehensive customer view to access vital information within a unified interface.
Although it does offer native integrations for certain popular third-party services and applications, the number of integrations available has some limitations.
The following are the main characteristics:
- 360-degree access to customer profiles, complete with customer touchpoints
- AI-powered lead scoring for prioritizing leads and boosting sales
- Sales team grouping and automatic lead assignments
- Visual sales pipeline with a drag-and-drop navigation
- Mobile app integration for managing your business processes on the go
- Automatic contact profile updates
- Appointment booking and phone calls right from the platform
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The pricing begins at $15/month per user, with annual billing.
- Streak CRM for Gmail
If you already use Gmail or G Suite, Streak CRM might be the best CRM software for you as it enables tracking of customer emails and leads, contact management, and monitoring of sales funnels for both G Suite and free Gmail accounts.
You have the capability to automatically gather leads from your contacts, incorporate tasks and reminders, arrange emails, generate personalized pipelines/funnels, include tags and notes, and perform additional functions.
Streak CRM offers workflow management functionalities such as hiring, project management, sales, support, among others. Additionally, these features can be tailored to suit your specific requirements. Due to its integration with Gmail, the platform is user-friendly, even for those who are new to it.
This simple CRM software is available as a browser addon or mobile app for iOS and Android. In addition, it allows third-party integrations using Gmail and Zapier.
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- Track all your contacts in a pipeline (with custom views)
- Track and share customer interactions with your team members
- Easily import and export data
- Mobile apps help you stay connected, track calls, and take notes from anywhere
- Mail merge to send mass emails easily
- Easy third-party integration with hundreds of platforms
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The free plan offered by Streak CRM has limited features. For businesses, it is recommended to choose one of the paid plans which start at $49/month per user when billed annually.
What are the benefits of a CRM for small businesses?
The adoption of CRM software provides a competitive edge to a company in various ways, including reducing production costs, enhancing sales revenue, and expanding market share.
To avoid slowing down your employees with unnecessary and disjointed tools, it’s crucial to consider their diverse goals.
Below are some additional advantages that a reliable CRM provides:
- 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.
4 must-have features of a small business CRM
Let’s cover some of the baseline features before we delve into four of our favorite small business CRM features. Here is a checklist of the typical requirements you should consider.
- Contact management
- Sales automation
- Lead management
- Business intelligence and reporting
- Centralized internal and external communication
Now, let us examine the four fundamental features of CRM that can assist your small business in acquiring the necessary advantages.
- Tool integrations
In order to establish a centralized hub, you will have to integrate all your other tools into the CRM platform. By integrating your CRM with other applications, you can gather all the necessary information in one place, thus saving time that would otherwise be spent switching between different windows.
- Workflow automation
An effective CRM for small businesses revolves around the implementation of workflow automation.
By implementing automations for repetitive manual tasks, your team is able to dedicate their time to revenue-generating activities. This allows them to prioritize customer service and minimize time spent on searching for information, coordinating with colleagues, and dealing with other time-consuming tasks.
There are some examples of workflow automation that can be beneficial for sales, marketing, or customer support teams.
- Notify a sales rep when the company receives a new lead
- Set up recurring task reminders for ongoing activities
- Create follow-up reminders after a certain time period has passed
- Send a welcome email to a new prospect
- Update an item status on a certain date
- Create automated outreach sequences for each prospect and customer (For example, using Spotio’s AutoPlays)
You have the option to connect these automations to your tool integrations, such as sending notifications or follow-ups through Slack or Gmail.
- Personalized communication
A quality CRM tool surpasses basic lead management by promoting individualized interaction between your business and customers on all available occasions.
Strong contact management meticulously keeps a record of all customer interactions with your business throughout a period. This record should encompass the customer’s name, contact details, preferred mode of communication, and the most recent interaction with your company.
By closely monitoring your customer relationship, it becomes simple to offer a smooth experience to each customer. Regardless of their department, be it sales, marketing, or customer service, any team member can seamlessly continue from where a previous employee left off, even if they have not interacted with that customer previously.
- Pipeline management
In order to effectively track a prospect’s progress in their buyer’s journey, it is essential to have a platform that enables easy visualization of the sales process. This platform should provide information on the prospect’s current stage, the timing of their entry into that stage, and the duration of their presence in that stage.
Once you have this information, you can utilize it to monitor customers, streamline notifications to sales representatives, and customize your communication for subsequent follow-up or customer support.
Qualities to look out for when choosing a CRM for your small business
When selecting a tool to expand your small business, there are some qualities that 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?
In order to select the most suitable CRM for your small business, you should begin by identifying your requirements, assessing your budget, examining various solutions, evaluating the necessary integrations, and finally experimenting with different systems by utilizing free plans or free trials.
What is the cost of a CRM for small businesses?
The cost of a CRM for small businesses varies significantly depending on the specific CRM and the required features. While certain CRMs provide a perpetual free plan, others solely offer a trial period. Typically, the expenses will lie within the range of $10-100 per user.
Can small businesses benefit from using a CRM?
Indeed, small businesses can utilize a CRM to monitor customer interactions, handle customer data, and enhance marketing and sales strategies. Furthermore, a CRM can assist in streamlining processes, enhancing customer service, and cultivating improved customer relationships.
