Customer relationship management or CRM software is used by businesses to enhance sales, promote growth, and deliver outstanding customer experiences.
A CRM software is the best way to connect your business with your buyer persona and build lasting relationships. It is one of the greatest ways you will ever streamline your sales process and grow your business.
Multiple CRM solutions are available in the market, each offering distinct features and benefits.
These CRM solutions can automate processes and integrate customer data, ultimately enhancing sales performance and improving team collaboration.
To help make your decision easier, we’ve researched and compiled a list of the best CRM software.
Here are the top 4 CRM software platforms:
HubSpot CRM
Zoho CRM
Agile CRM
Freshsales CRM
What Is Customer Relationship Management (CRM)?
Definition and Benefits
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a business strategy that focuses on building and maintaining strong relationships with customers.
Customer retention is a key aspect of CRM, as it aims to keep customers engaged and loyal to the business. CRM software is a tool that helps businesses manage customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle.
The primary goal of CRM is to improve customer satisfaction, increase sales, and enhance customer loyalty.
The benefits of CRM include:
Improved customer relationships: CRM helps businesses understand their customers better, enabling them to provide personalized services and build strong relationships.
Increased sales: CRM provides sales teams with valuable insights into customer behavior, helping them identify new sales opportunities and close deals more effectively.
Enhanced customer service: CRM enables businesses to respond promptly to customer inquiries and concerns, improving customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Better decision-making: CRM provides businesses with valuable data and insights, enabling them to make informed decisions about marketing, sales, and customer service strategies.
Importance of CRM in Business
CRM is essential for businesses of all sizes, as it helps them manage customer interactions and data effectively.
In today’s competitive market, businesses need to focus on building strong relationships with their customers and enhancing customer engagement to stay ahead of the competition.
CRM software provides businesses with the tools they need to manage customer relationships, improve customer satisfaction, and increase sales.
Benefits of CRM Software
CRM software offers numerous benefits to businesses, including:
Centralized Customer Data
One of the standout features of CRM software is its ability to centralize customer data. By providing a single, unified database for storing and managing customer information, CRM software ensures that all team members have access to accurate and up-to-date records.
This centralization not only facilitates better communication and coordination across departments but also helps in maintaining consistency in customer interactions. With all customer data in one place, businesses can easily track interactions, preferences, and history, leading to more informed and effective customer relationship management.
Improved Customer Relationships
Understanding your customers is key to building strong, lasting relationships, and CRM software excels in this area. By tracking every interaction and capturing customer preferences, CRM software provides valuable insights that enable businesses to tailor their communication and services.
This personalized approach not only enhances customer satisfaction but also fosters loyalty. When customers feel understood and valued, they are more likely to remain loyal to the brand, leading to long-term business success.
Increased Efficiency and Productivity
CRM software significantly boosts efficiency and productivity by automating routine tasks such as data entry, follow-ups, and reporting.
This automation allows sales and marketing teams to focus on more strategic activities, such as developing new campaigns and closing deals.
By reducing the time spent on administrative tasks, CRM software helps teams work smarter, not harder. The result is a more streamlined workflow, higher productivity, and ultimately, better business outcomes.
Enhanced Sales Management
Effective sales management is crucial for business growth, and CRM software provides the tools needed to excel in this area. With features for managing sales pipelines, tracking leads, and forecasting sales, CRM software helps sales teams prioritize their efforts and close deals more effectively.
By providing a clear view of the sales process, CRM software enables teams to identify bottlenecks, optimize their strategies, and ensure that no opportunity is missed. This enhanced sales management leads to higher conversion rates and increased revenue.
Better Analytics and Reporting
In today’s data-driven world, having access to powerful analytics tools is essential for making informed decisions.
Many CRM systems come equipped with robust analytics and reporting features that allow businesses to analyze customer data, track performance metrics, and generate customized reports.
These insights help businesses understand their customers better, measure the effectiveness of their strategies, and make data-driven decisions. With detailed reports and analytics, businesses can continuously refine their approach, leading to improved performance and growth.
By understanding and leveraging these benefits, businesses can choose the right CRM software to enhance their customer relationship management efforts and drive success.
What is the Best CRM software for 2024?
Selecting the right CRM software is crucial for connecting your business with your buyer persona and building lasting relationships.
It is one of the greatest ways you will ever streamline your sales process and grow your business.
We have made our pick of what we believe are the top CRM tools you can try for your business this year.
1. HubSpot CRM
HubSpot’s free CRM software is a powerful tool for any business looking to maximize sales and marketing performance. It provides all the tools needed to track customer data, manage customer relationships, and monitor lead activity.
The software is fully integrated with emails and website analytics so you can gain unprecedented insight into how your audience behaves. With features like email tracking, contact segmentation, website monitoring, and automated workflows, HubSpot can help optimize efforts in delighting customers from start to finish.
Additionally, HubSpot excels in lead nurturing, ensuring that potential customers are guided through the sales funnel effectively.
This comprehensive platform includes every tool necessary for building successful customer relations including direct messaging, calendar scheduling, notes organization, task creation and tracking. Additionally HubSpot provides detailed analytics about conversions from leads to closed deals.
Its top-notch reporting capabilities allow you access to an array of metrics such as opting-in rates, engagement scores on your campaigns, the average length of time each contact spends engaging with your content and more. Now businesses have a full picture of their marketing performance—all available at their fingertips via the comprehensive dashboard interface of HubSpot’s CRM software.
HubSpot Key Features
The CRM comes completely free of charge to manage your customer relationships.
Ease of use: HubSpot is easy to use. To register all you need is your email and domain, the rest of the way HubSpot has a great onboarding process for you to complete. The onboarding process is also easy to follow with step by step instructions and interactive demos.
Sales Management and Automation: HubSpot is equipped with sales management tools and sales automation features to streamline repetitive tasks and enhance customer engagement. You can track your deals, tasks, track contact communications. For sales you can even track open and clicks on your emails. It gives you the insight on when it’s the right time to talk to your prospect or client. You can build forms to enable data collection from your website directly to your CRM. Additionally, you can manage sales enablement tools like email templates, and documents. You also have live chat for your website with their free plan.
Marketing Tools: When using HubSpot, you can run email marketing campaigns, and paid ads to get your brand off the ground. Ad management tools can track Facebook, Google, Instagram, and LinkedIn return on investment. You can segment your contacts to enable you to reach the right customers with the right message.
Integrations: The HubSpot CRM has a range of apps available to integrate with. You can connect your company email to your HubSpot account and use the HubSpot extension to track email activity. You can even record new contacts directly from WhatsApp using apps like WhatHub.
Analytics and Reporting: The free version of HubSpot CRM has some limitations to reporting. Reports range all the way from contacts created to website interactions. You can get more of these reports with a paid version. If you want to understand how your audience consumes information, then HubSpot is the CRM for you.
Project and Task management: When using HubSpot, you can manage your team, assign tasks, and track them. HubSpot makes it easy to manage your day to day meetings, and tasks.
See our review of HubSpot CRM.
Pros
The feature set is comprehensive.
There is a free version available with generous features.
There is now support available for integrated payment processing.
Cons
Certain features may only be accessible at higher pricing levels.
Certain features require some time to learn.
HubSpot CRM Pricing
HubSpot offers a free forever plan with CRM and some advanced email marketing features.
All in One Marketing Tool
The HubSpot CRM is a great tool for businesses of any size with to build and grow theirsales.
2. Salesforce
Salesforce is one of the most known CRM software on the market. It has more than a million subscribers worldwide. Like HubSpot, they have a collection of sales, service, and marketing tools to help you succeed. Salesforce has an outstanding community.
With Salesforce, you can identify opportunities and manage the customer journey with your Salesforce module. You also get performance management tools. It has a range of integrations to work with and improve the functionality of your platform.
Salesforce Key Features
Ease of use: Salesforce is easy to use and gives you a full view of your business. You can even find opportunities throughout your business. Support is available 24/7 via mail, phone, and tickets.
Sales Management and Automation: You can manage contacts, collaborate with your team on sales, and manage leads. It has a high level of automation and business intelligence features. You can track and manage opportunities. Also, go as far as tracking customer history, communications, and social media mentions.
Marketing Tools: Inbuilt process builder and lead generation tools are available for you to improve your sales process and increase leads. Salesforce has built Einstein lead scoring. It uses data and machine learning to discover your business lead conversion patterns and helps you determine which leads to prioritize.
Integrations: Email Integration is available. You can integrate with some of the biggest third-party applications like Zendesk, and LeadExc to improve functionality. It has an open API, so it’s highly customizable to fit your brand.
Analytics and Reporting: You can forecast your sales, and get a full view of what happening in your business with their reporting features. The reports are accurate. You can manage your sales performance by setting sales goals, and target updates for best sales performance.
Project and Task Management: Using the visual workflow you can drag, drop share, and track your files and any updates to your sales. For project management, you can use in-built tools or integrate with a third-party project management tool.
Salesforce Pricing
Salesforce has different price offers for different products, so depending on your needs the prices will vary. Plans start from $25 per user per month their highest priced plan is $1250 per month. They also have the option of a customized plan.
3. Agile CRM
Agile CRM is a cloud-based all-in-one CRM focused on automating your marketing and sales on one platform. It is one of the most affordable SaaS Platforms around. Agile CRM is a comprehensive customer relationship management platform that allows companies to manage and track their customer interactions in one single dashboard. It helps businesses of all sizes to act like Fortune 500 companies by providing powerful **marketing automation,**sales enablement, and customer service tools. Agile CRM enables users to gain control over each step of the customer’s journey with them.
Agile CRM also provides valuable customer insights, helping businesses understand their customers better and tailor their strategies accordingly.
The software includes essential features such as customizable reports for tracking campaigns, an AI-powered contact database, automated conversion optimization tools, website visitor tracking, email blast scheduling and automation, and built-in analytics that allow users to run A/B tests to improve engagement with customers.
It also includes other features like
Contact segmentation for targeted messages and drip campaigns;
Collaborative task management
Live chat integration
Team collaboration with shared workspaces
eCommerce support and a mobile app accessible on both Android and iOS platforms
SMS notifications integrated into the user’s workflow
Social media monitoring so company can respond quickly to complaints or inquiries made on Twitter or Facebook accounts.
Overall, Agile CRM boasts a feature set tailored to help small businesses boost their sales process efficiency on an appealing web interface that is quick to learn and simple enough for beginners to be up and running in no
With Agile CRM, you can manage contacts, projects, and schedule appointments. Additionally, you can run your email marketing campaigns.
Agile CRM Key Features
Ease of use: Agile CRM is easy to use and has a free plan that offers up to 10 users. It’s cloud-based so it’s affordable to set up. It also has easy data entry features to work with meaning, you can keep your customer data up to date without hustle.
Sales Management and Automation: There is efficient contact management on a single page to enable you to close more sales. You can manage appointments by sharing your calendar online. It also allows you to have automated scheduling email invites and follow-ups. You can create a dynamic landing page for your lead generation.
Marketing Tools: Email marketing has the highest conversion rate in digital marketing. Agile CRM has email marketing tools, personalization features, and tracking to analyze results. Agile CRM has some of the great exit-intent popup to convert abandoning visitors. You also make use of marketing automation with workflows and autoresponders.
Integrations: Agile CRM gives you the option to integrate with Email, billing plugins, eCommerce, and more. You will find some of the popular platforms like Shopify, and Intuit QuickBooks.
Analytics and Reporting: Agile CRM gives you data presented in graphs and has some powerful reporting. You get conversion reports advanced analytics and more. You can even customize your reports and schedule report delivery for autogenerating and sending. It’s also a great platform to see where your leads are falling off using funnel reporting.
Project and Task management: With Agile CRM it’s easy to drag and drop tasks, edit them, and mark them as complete. Marking a task complete in Agile CRM automatically updates all related records for you. Need to change priority or add more details to a task? Just click on it from Agile’s intuitive interface and make the changes you need. It’s that simple.
Pros
The feature set is comprehensive.
There is a free version available with generous features.
There is now support available for integrated payment processing.
Cons
Certain features may only be accessible at higher pricing levels.
Certain features require some time to learn.
Pricing
Agile CRM has a free plan with unlimited features and paid plans starting from $8.99 tp 47.99 per user per month
Scheduling tools
Best CRM software with scheduling and appointments. It also offers some collaborative task management.
4. Zoho CRM
Zoho offers a fully-featured free edition of its flagship CRM software. The Zoho CRM has everything you need to keep track of leads, follow up with customers and prospects, and perform customer segmentation. You can also organize your data and manage your sales pipeline.
You can also get integrations with other Zoho apps and third-party services like dropbox. Ease of Use Zoho CRM is an easy-to-use CRM solution that provides complete automation for all your business processes.
This includes lead management, sales pipeline management, and marketing campaign tracking through a simple step-by-step interface.
Zoho CRM Key Features
Ease of use: Zoho CRM brings all your customer information together. This helps you to respond quickly to every request that comes in. The contact tool lets you manage your prospects as well as clients. Plus, you can track opportunities related to them through the Opportunity Tracker.
Sales Management and Automation: Zoho CRM brings all your customer information together. This helps you to respond quickly to every request that comes in. The Contact Tool lets you manage your prospects as well as clients. Plus, you can track opportunities related to them through the Opportunity Tracker.
Marketing Tools: Zoho has some useful features for marketing automation customer segmentation. Lead nurturing and google ads management are part of the marketing automation feature.
Integrations: Zoho CRM offers over 500 extensions with popular tools like Google Workplace, Outlook, Mailchimp, Slack, Office 365, and AWS. You can also create custom integrations between Zoho Connect and 200+ business apps using Zoho Flow.
Analytics and Reporting: Reporting on Zoho uses a wide range, From customizing reports, to using charts and cohorts. You can make use of templates to run, and export to PDF.
Project and Task Management: Zoho CRM makes it easy for teams to work together on specific projects and campaigns. You can collaborate with colleagues over email or chat. add new tasks for each other to work on, share documents and calendars, and set up recurring meetings in the Calendar. You can manage projects, track status updates, and send out reminders with the Project Tracker. With its simple interface, you can schedule tasks and resources in just a few clicks.
Zoho CRM Pricing
Zoho CRM offers a freemium plan for up to 3 users. They have three pricing plans costing $12(Standard), $20(Professional), $35 (Enterprise) and for the ultimate plan per user per month. (billed annually)
5. Freshsales
Freshsales is an integrated platform for sales teams that allows them to get organized. Your team engages leads fast with built-in chat, email, and phone support.
It helps manage the entire customer lifecycle, from initial contact to closing deals.
Also, you can collect feedback in real-time, close more deals faster with built-in deal management tools. Most importantly, you make better decisions using intuitive dashboards and analytics.
Freshsales is a complete package for sales teams with everything they need to close more deals without any headaches or hassles.
Freshsales Key Features
Ease of use: Freshsales is a complete sales CRM and sales pipeline management solution. It is an easy to use and affordable tool that helps you organize your sales team and engage leads.
Sales Management and Automation: The software tracks sales interactions, notifies behavior changes, sets up pipeline stages, creates targeted campaigns, and includes live chat for sales reps.
Marketing Tools: With Freshsales Suite, you can unite your marketing and sales efforts. You will have a holistic view of your customer, nature relationships, and grow sales. You can create landing pages to monitor and understand visitor intent. Also, you can tailor your email marketing campaigns to generate leads.
Integrations: You can connect Fresh sales with your favorite tools, like Google workspace, PayPal, Intuit QuickBooks, and more.
Integrations: You can connect Fresh sales with your favorite tools, like Google workspace, PayPal, Intuit QuickBooks, and more.
Analytics and Reporting: The Freshsales platform also comes with extensive reporting capabilities. This gives you insights into your lead generation efforts, pipeline forecast, activity history, etc. There are two ways you can use the reports. You can either export reports as PDF or Microsoft Excel sheets or creating dashboards for various metrics. For example, pipeline progress or close-ratio, etc.
Project and Task management: You can use Freshsales to manage your sales activities, schedule appointments, and more. Also, you can record activities calls to keep track.
Pricing
Freshsales is the Freshworks and offers four plans, $12 to $79 per user per month (billed annually) You can also start for free.
6. Pipedrive
Pipe Drive is an all-in-one sales platform for growing revenue. It has over 95,000 paying customers across close to 200 countries.
It offers a suite of tools for managing, tracking, and optimizing your sales processes based on customer feedback. The Pipe Drive platform is built for the way your sales and marketing teams work, not just what they do.
It’s the all-in-one platform for growing revenue, from lead generation to customer success.
PipeDrive offers you a complete set of features to manage your sales process. It comes with features like:
Multi-channel Email Marketing
Advanced CRM management
Sales Management Dashboard
Collaboration Tools
Campaigns & Prospecting
Lead Management
The downside it has limited functionality for the price and you can’t separate your contact list between new leads and contacts.
Ease of use
Ease of use: Pipe Drive offers an intuitive interface and a workflow focused on deals with your clients. It is easy to use with a great sync between mobile apps, calls, and emails. This makes it straightforward. Also, you can customize it to your brand.
Sales Management and Automation: Pipe Drive is powered by an AI sales assistant to improve the performance of your sales team. The workflow automation helps reduce the workload on salespersons so they can focus on what matters most – making sales. You can streamline repetitive tasks to have more time to sell. Also, use the help of the marketing contact data to find valuable information faster and close deals much quicker.
Marketing Tools: Pipe Drive can integrate multiple add-on platforms to help with lead generation and marketing automation. You can also integrate PipeDrive with HubSpot.
Integrations: Create custom integrations to connect PipeDrive with your favorite apps and services. Plus you can get powerful data insights that help you make better business decisions. Integrate with the most popular platforms in Accounting & invoicing, Analytics, Bots & messaging, Contacts & calendar sync, Customer support, and Data management. All this will make your experience better. Additionally, you have Email marketing, Integration platforms, Lead Generation, Marketing automation, and more.
Analytics and Reporting: Analyzing data can help you understand your customers more. You can also get insight into whether your team is performing or not. Look for a CRM that can track even activities like email sending so you know if your efforts are aligned with your business goals. This way you can adjust accordingly.
Project and Task Management: Pipe Drive Project Management is currently free to test in beta to a closed group of users. It will be released to more users later After the beta period ends. The date is not specified but it will require an additional subscription.
Pipdrive Pricing
Pipedrive offers a 14day free trial on all paid plans. The plans start from $12.50, to $99.00
7. Insightly
Insightly is everyone’s favorite CRM software. It’s intuitive, easy-to-use, and gets the job done. You can create your own sales funnel with not just leads, but contacts, customers, and opportunity records as well.
One of the key benefits of using Insightly is its ability to enhance customer loyalty.
Managing data is as easy as dragging and dropping. You can even customize it with your own branding!
Insightly Key Features
Ease of use: Insightly aligns your team around a single source of customer information for sales, marketing, and service. It’s easy to use and you can customize your sales process on the platform. Insightly is also highly customizable.
Sales Management and Automation: Insightly helps you build relationships with existing customers and get new customers on board. You can also manage the performance of your sales team, track sales pitches, and identify where a client falls in the sales funnel. It has inbuilt automated email reminders and tracking. It has visual dashboards for displaying and tracking important metrics.
Marketing Tools: With Insightly you can design beautiful emails, and send to your segmented contacts. You can run effective email marketing campaigns engaging customers at every stage of the buyer’s journey.
Integrations: Insightly’s AppConnect helps with integrations and information exchange between apps. You can run integrations from within Insightly marketing and CRM.
Analytics and Reporting: You can design dashboards using the drag-and-drop feature and have a view of insights and even share them with your team.
Project and Task management: You can seamlessly convert won opportunities into projects and manage processes. Also, integrate external apps to run your projects.
Insightly Pricing
Insightly offers three pricing plans for $29, $49 and $99 per user per month (billed annual)
What is a Customer Relationship Management Software?
A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a digital tool that helps companies collect, manage and understand customer data on a big scale. A CRM works for the marketing, sales, and support team so they build valuable relationships with a customer and improve customer support.
When you use a CRM, you get a full picture of the buyer’s journey. Because of this information, you can help your customers better and enhance your service offering.
Say, for example, you don’t have a CRM, 10 customers file a complaint through a salesperson, and 10 more files with a different salesperson. Because there is no record chances are the complaint will be addressed at your weekly meeting and not solved.
But, in the case of a CRM, the sales manager, and sales rep get an email notification, will see a feed of customer communications on your dashboard if you are using Hubspot CRM. The chances of missing or undermining the complaints are low.
When you have a CRM you help your, customers, quicker because you can streamline task priorities much better and in one place.
CRM Software Features
CRM software typically includes a range of features that help businesses manage customer relationships, including:
Customer analytics tools provide valuable insights and track performance metrics.
Contact Management
Contact management is a critical feature of CRM software, enabling businesses to store and manage customer contact information, including names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses. CRM software also allows businesses to track customer interactions, including emails, phone calls, and meetings.
Other key features of CRM software include:
Sales management: CRM software provides sales teams with tools to manage sales pipelines, track leads, and forecast sales.
Marketing management: CRM software enables businesses to manage marketing campaigns, track customer responses, and analyze marketing effectiveness.
Customer service management: CRM software provides customer service teams with tools to manage customer inquiries, track customer issues, and resolve customer complaints.
Reporting and analytics: CRM software provides businesses with valuable insights into customer behavior, sales performance, and marketing effectiveness.
By understanding the features and benefits of CRM software, businesses can make informed decisions about which CRM solution is right for them.
What are The Benefits of Using a CRM for Sales and Marketing Teams?
In today’s market customers are picky when it comes to brands. They want brands that offer excellent and consistent customer experience.
Businesses using a CRM can get a better understanding of what the customers need and want. This way they can have a clear strategy to outshine their competitors. The aim – is to earn their customer loyalty and trust.
Here are some benefits of using a CRM;
Better Client Relationships
Improved brand reputation
Greater sales opportunities
Better team collaboration
Best CRM for Small Businesses
There are many CRM platforms for small businesses, but here are some of the best-known:
Salesforce
Salesforce.com is one of the most popular CRMs in the world because it has a large feature-set and a very active community. It’s easy to use, has good security and its pricing is relatively transparent. It also has an excellent mobile app, which is important when you’re on the go.
Trello
If your small business is heavily project-oriented and uses Kanban or scrum methodologies, then Trello may be a good option for you. Trello works well as a Gantt chart and lets you see progress across all projects at once.
HubSpot CRM
This is another well-known platform that’s designed to work with other HubSpot software and integrates with most other popular applications, including Salesforce.com, Google Apps, MailChimp, and more.
A free version of HubSpot CRM includes basic contact management features, but plans with advanced features can get pricey if you have more than 100 contacts in your database.
Zoho CRM
Zoho CRM offers several different plans to fit different budgets and needs, including free versions with limited
Best CRM for Enterprise Businesses
If you are searching for a business management software that can multiply your productivity, then you should choose the best CRM software. There are many companies that provide these CRM systems, but you should consider some points before choosing one.
First of all, you need to understand the requirements of the system. Many companies are not aware of their needs and requirements and end up selecting the wrong software.
For example, if you want to implement a cloud-based system then it is essential to look for it in the specification sheet provided by the company.
Second, consider your budget and company size. If your business is small, then a simple application will do. However, if you have a big business with many employees, then you have to choose a complex system that will be able to manage and aid them.
Another point worth considering is the platform on which it is based and its support system.
The best thing about such systems is that they allow you to create different user groups and assign different permissions to each group for better management. It also allows you to create an unlimited number of users in accordance with your requirements.
Here are our top picks
Hubspot
SalesForce
Zoho CRM
In summary CRM Platforms
Overall, these CRM systems will give you an endless amount of power to effectively manage your relationships with customers and clients. Think of it as customer relationship building on steroids. You get all the tools you could possibly imagine at an affordable price.
And not only are these CRMs affordable, but many of the functions that you may need are always below the surface.
They offer a good range of base essentials and anything else you might require is just a click away. So one question remains: Which would be better for your business?
If you are a small business, price and ease of use will most likely be the main influence of your choice of a CRM.
So, Hubspot for us would be a straightforward choice as it gives you a free CRM, and with a starter paid plan you have access to CMS, for building your website, sales, marketing, service, and operations.
These come as a bundle on the starter plan. And even when you want to scale as enterprise business, you can still bundle the higher plans to get the full functionality of the Hubspot platform.
