CRM software is transforming the way small businesses operate, enabling them to gain in-depth knowledge about their customers, predict their requirements, and enhance their sales and marketing procedures.
What is the significance of this?
It is crucial for the survival and growth of e-commerce, SaaS, and other online businesses to understand how to generate loyal customers as the internet has transformed the way companies operate and consumers make purchases.
By utilizing CRM software, you can enhance customer service, boost sales, and foster strong relationships by collecting and organizing data all within one platform. This enables you to serve existing customers more efficiently while effectively generating new leads.
What is CRM software & how does it work?
Business CRMs are responsible for the management of customer data and interactions. They possess fundamental functionalities that aid in the organization and accessibility of customer data, monitoring customer interactions, performing repetitive tasks, and facilitating the sharing of this information with colleagues.
It is crucial for online businesses to adopt various forms of business automation in order to expand and enhance their operations. Likewise, the significance of CRM software is growing for companies to establish customer relationships and expand their business workflows.
By 2023, businesses will be able to offer highly personalized customer experiences through CRM software that is more powerful than ever before. This software will be centralized and enhanced by artificial intelligence (AI) and mobile integrations.
AI technologies are equipped with live chat software that is capable of assessing customer requirements, anticipating areas of concern, and examining customer activities, data, location, interests, and other factors.
First, CRM software gathers customer data from different sources, including customer communications, website visits, and social media interactions. Next, this data is stored in a central database to generate customer profiles and track customer success.
The customer interactions are tracked by the profiles, which then offer insights into customer behavior and contact information. Using this social data, you can develop targeted marketing campaigns, enhance customer service personalization, and improve the overall customer experience. The CRM software is a versatile platform that can be customized to fulfill all your requirements.
Why Should You Invest In CRM Software?
There are numerous advantages for your business both before and after the sale when you invest in customer relationship management software.
CRM software offers a range of advantages, which include:
- Better customer relationship management
- Increase sales
- Understand your customers’ needs
- Provide a better customer experience
- Improve contact management
Improving the management of customer relationships.
CRM software offers a key advantage by aiding in the management of customer success and relationships. Using CRM platforms, customers are able to engage with businesses by means of email or chat. With the assistance of AI-driven sales assistants, business CRMs are capable of addressing these interactions.
Sales should be increased.
The use of CRM software has the potential to enhance sales by assisting with process optimization, developing a sales pipeline, automating essential tasks, and analyzing sales data. The optimization of processes is a vital advantage of utilizing CRM tools.
Understand the needs of your customers by thinking step by step.
By using it, you can trace customer interactions and detect sales potential, document service problems, oversee marketing campaigns in a single centralized place, and disseminate information about each customer interaction to relevant personnel within your organization.
The process of anticipating customer needs becomes easier, resulting in an improved customer experience.
Ensure that the customer has an improved experience by following a systematic approach.
CRM software provides an additional advantage of enhancing customer service and loyalty. This is achieved through the ability to monitor all customer interactions, analyze the data, and implement a more tailored approach in future conversations and sales management.
In a single platform, this information both saves your employees time and streamlines the sales-to-order process.
Enhance the management of contacts by approaching it in a systematic manner, considering each step carefully to maintain efficiency and accuracy.
CRM software has the capability to benefit your small business in two main ways: firstly, by consolidating contact information into a single location, and secondly, by effectively tracking a customer’s journey with your company.
How Can You Choose The Right CRM Solution?
When selecting a CRM solution for your business, it can be overwhelming due to the wide array of choices available. Therefore, it is crucial to establish a set of requirements beforehand and comprehend the specific obstacles you aim to address through the chosen CRM.
Here are four steps that can help in selecting the most suitable CRM software:
- Identify your goals
- Evaluate features
- Consider support and integrations
- Research pricing
In order to ensure the implementation process is quick and easy, many CRMs offer a 14-day or 30-day free trial. During this time, you can assess whether the CRM system is suitable for your needs and user-friendly for clients.
Determine your objectives step by step.
To effectively choose a CRM solution, it is crucial to follow a systematic approach. The initial step involves recognizing and defining your company’s objectives.
To ensure success, it is crucial to clearly outline the objectives of your business and comprehend the necessity of implementing a CRM solution. These objectives encompass escalating sales activities, employing email marketing techniques, and enhancing both sales productivity and customer retention. After identifying these goals, you can proceed to select the appropriate customer relationship management software.
Assess the characteristics.
Step by step thinking involves evaluating key features when selecting a CRM. The ideal CRM should have an understanding of communication methods. Additionally, it should provide easy import and export of data without requiring extra effort or training.
Consider support and integration aspects while thinking step by step when rephrasing the given text. Do not add or remove any information, but ensure you maintain the same meaning.
When considering support and integrations, it is important to acknowledge that customer support teams are one of the most influential features of a CRM solution. It is typical to come across issues when utilizing a CRM, therefore, it is essential to verify that the vendor possesses a proficient customer service team that is prompt in offering assistance.
Conducting price research is achieved by thinking systematically and following a step-by-step approach.
The pricing plans for CRM software depend on the number of features and users required. For small businesses, there are monthly plans ranging from $12 to $20 per user. For those in need of advanced packages, the cost will be between $50 and $150 per month per user. The highest expense is associated with CRMs priced at $300 or higher per month per user.
Breaking down the best cloud CRMs for small businesses
Now, let’s examine the best choices available.
- OpenPhone: The best cloud CRM for small businesses
OpenPhone is a CRM that is not heavy and offers unlimited phone calls and text messages to both the US and Canada. By using OpenPhone, you can conveniently view all calls, texts, and voice messages with specific contacts in one place. There is no need to be concerned about missing any calls anymore, as shared numbers can be utilized to distribute the responsibility for incoming calls among your team.
OpenPhone allows your business to establish exclusive business numbers to safeguard personal cell numbers of your team members. If you require multiple phone numbers to handle incoming calls, you have the option to obtain as many local US, Canadian, or toll-free numbers as necessary for your team.
If your team is focused on customer relations, you can utilize OpenPhone to automatically record customer interactions and make updates to details such as their name, email, or sales stage. Through the ability to customize properties and add notes to individual contacts, accessing updated customer information becomes effortless, enabling any staff member to effectively follow up with customers.
By collaborating with your team using a common identifier, you can also allocate tasks and involve colleagues using internal threads. To further enhance time-saving measures for your team, you can utilize automations through Zapier and webhooks.
When it comes to automation, OpenPhone offers immediate AI transcriptions for all phone calls. In addition, you can utilize AI-generated call summaries to evaluate the actions to be taken following each call. By providing instant call summaries, OpenPhone enables the entire team to align and progress sales and customer success discussions.
The pricing for OpenPhone is being thought through in a step-by-step manner while ensuring that no new information is added or removed.
- Starter: $15 per user per month for shared phone numbers, internal threads, contact notes, voicemail transcriptions, scheduled messages, auto-replies, manual call recording, and more
- Business: $23 per user per month for automatic call recording, AI call summaries and transcripts, and integrations with HubSpot and Salesforce
- Enterprise: Custom pricing for a custom plan, including audit logs and priority support
- HubSpot Sales Hub
HubSpot provides email marketing and free tools for social media scheduling, which you may have been introduced to. However, in addition to these products, HubSpot is also a major player in the cloud CRM industry as it offers a scalable CRM solution.
In the Starter plan of its CRM Suite, HubSpot provides an array of features which encompass contact and deal pipeline management, list segmentation, contact intent tracking, and simple automation workflows.
Regrettably, businesses using HubSpot’s basic CRM plan encounter limitations in terms of calling features. The plan allows only one phone number per account and restricts call time to a mere 500 minutes. This can prove inadequate for communicating with leads and contacts, particularly as your business expands and acquires new customers.
By combining OpenPhone with HubSpot, you can consolidate all your customer interactions into one centralized platform. The integration between OpenPhone and HubSpot ensures that every call, text, and voice message is automatically recorded and stored in HubSpot, allowing your team to prioritize more personalized tasks.
The pricing for HubSpot Sales Hub
Below are the listed prices for Sales Hub, one of the various products offered by HubSpot to businesses based on their specific use cases.
- Free Tools: $0 per month for access to the basic CRM
- Starter: $18 per month to access calling functionality, conversation routing, automation, and more
- Professional: $450 per month to access rep productivity performance, call transcription and coaching, deal and company scoring, sales analytics, forecasting, and more
- Bigin by Zoho CRM
Bigin by Zoho is a customer relationship management system specifically created for small businesses to handle interactions with customers.
Bigin allows you to:
- Create team-specific pipelines and customize pipeline stages for your business
- Automate workflows based on new customer interactions and pipeline updates
- See how your sales, customer success, and support teams perform with analytics and dashboards for each pipeline
Bigin lacks advanced features required for the growth of small businesses. This means that accessing AI features such as call transcripts, summaries, and action items is not possible, making it more time-consuming to understand customer interactions and take appropriate measures. Moreover, integration with other workplace apps like Gmail is only available in Bigin’s paid plans.
One drawback of utilizing Bigin by Zoho CRM is the potential difficulty in customization. As evidenced by a recent review, customers have expressed their concerns regarding the limited availability of custom fields and absence of email templates. Moreover, creating email templates independently has proven to be challenging.
Start by considering the pricing of Zoho CRM.
- Free: $0 per user per month for 500 records, three instant workflows, and one pipeline
- Express: $7 per user per month for 50,000 records, 10 instant workflows, and three pipelines
- Premier: $12 per user per month for 100,000 records, 30 advanced workflows, and five pipelines
- Freshsales
Freshsales is a distinctive SaaS that consolidates customer service, IT, and CRM software into one platform. After registering for either a free or paid tier, you can effectively oversee customer relationships by utilizing various views to arrange contact and deal details.
Freshsales’ main feature is its contact scoring powered by AI, which shows the level of interest of contacts and leads in your sales pipeline. This scoring system is based on both positive and negative signals, allowing you to analyze your data and make smarter choices.
Although Freshsales provides certain AI-powered tools, it lacks AI capabilities such as call transcripts, summaries, and action items. This may result in challenges when trying to gather information about customer interactions or when following up with contacts during the process of finalizing a deal.
In its basic tiers, Freshsales does not provide essential calling features such as group calling and holiday call routing for when teammates are absent from the office.
The pricing for Freshsales.
- Free: $0 per user per month for email templates, custom fields, and access to the mobile app (three users max)
- Growth: $15 per user per month to access the visual sales pipeline, AI-powered contact scoring, and sales sequences
- Pro: $39 per user per month to access AI-powered deal insights, time-based workflows, and more
- Enterprise: $69 per user per month to access AI-based forecasting insights, a dedicated account manager, and more
- Pipedrive
Pipedrive is a CRM designed for small businesses that provides basic functionalities. Along with tools for managing leads and deals in a pipeline, it also allows users to personalize their pipeline stages and fields.
Pipedrive is known for targeting expanding sales teams in its marketing. Its smart contact data feature utilizes publicly accessible information to assess leads before they are qualified, enabling your team to prioritize contacts with a strong interest.
Unfortunately, Pipedrive has limitations for small businesses in terms of consistent contact communications. Specifically, this CRM does not have built-in calling and messaging capabilities. As a result, it is not possible to call or text contacts or keep a record of past interactions using Pipedrive. However, by integrating your Pipedrive account with a business phone solution, you can combine the pre-qualifying feature of Pipedrive with calling and messaging functionalities for automated communication purposes for your sales and customer success teams.
The pricing for Pipedrive remains the same.
- Essential: $14.90 per user per month to access basic lead, deal, contact, and calendar tools
- Advanced: $27.90 per user per month to access full email sync with templates, automations, and meeting scheduling
- Professional: $49.90 per user per month to access lead routing, contract management, and revenue forecasts
- Power: $64.90 per user per month to access project planning, account permissions, and phone support
- Enterprise: $99.00 per user per month to access unlimited reports and enhanced security
- ClickUp
ClickUp is a project management platform that can be modified to function as a CRM. One of its notable aspects is its pricing, as the free tier is perpetually free and allows for unlimited plan members, enabling you to expand your team without incurring additional expenses.
Using ClickUp, small businesses can benefit in multiple ways. They can access collaborative docs, project management tools, and a cloud CRM all in one platform. Additionally, they have the option to enable AI call transcripts, summaries, and action items, ensuring they can stay updated on customers and avoid losing important information.
Using ClickUp as a CRM does have some drawbacks. One drawback is that it is a horizontal product, meaning it has many features, which can make it more difficult to set up without a lot of initial work. First, you need to create your preferred workflow directly in the platform, which may be a challenge for busy business owners. Additionally, training your team members on how to use the CRM can be difficult because it does not have a recognizable interface like existing products. Another drawback is that ClickUp’s communication features are limited. While you can send emails, you cannot make calls or text your customers. To solve this issue, you would need to integrate ClickUp with a business phone system to automatically log calls and messages in the platform.
The pricing for ClickUp.
- Free: $0 per user per month for 100 MB of storage, unlimited tasks, and unlimited free plan members
- Unlimited: $7 per user per month to access unlimited storage, integrations, dashboards, and more
- Business: $12 per user per month to access Google SSO, unlimited teams, advanced automations, and more
- Business Plus: $19 per user per month to access team sharing, custom permissions, increased automations, API, and more
- Enterprise: Contact Sales to access enterprise API, HIPAA compliance, customer success manager, and more
- Close
Designed for expanding sales teams, Close is a CRM that offers not only essential features for recording phone calls and messages, but also a metrics dashboard that enables the monitoring of your business KPIs.
Close has several distinctive features that make it stand out for sales teams.
- The Power Dialer, where reps can call a list of leads without touching a keyboard or mouse
- The Predictive Dialer, where reps can dial multiple numbers at once and speak to a real human when they come on the line
- Leaderboards, where sales teams can see individual rep performance at a glance
The calling and texting functionality of Close has a few notable drawbacks that make it unsuitable for every small business.
- Close doesn’t store call recordings longer than seven days in its basic pricing tier, which can be detrimental to fostering strong and sustainable customer relationships across your team
- Close doesn’t have any AI features for call transcripts, summaries, or action items, which places more burden on your team to understand customer context
- Close doesn’t offer auto-replies for text messages, which means your team can set any expectations when they’re off for the day or temporarily unavailable
Pricing that is near or equal in value.
- Startup: $99 per month for three sequences, the Power Dialer, and integrations with Zapier (includes 3 users)
- Professional: $299 per month to access multiple pipelines, custom activities, and sales sequences (includes 3 users)
- Enterprise: $699 per month to access custom objects, call coaching, predictive dialer, and custom roles (includes 5 users)
- monday sales CRM
From managing pre-sales leads to handling post-sales logistics, the Monday sales CRM is a user-friendly platform that encompasses each step of the customer sales process. It allows you to collect customer data from almost any interaction point.
Even if your business doesn’t prioritize sales, you can still utilize monday sales CRM to create dashboards for managing accounts, leads, contacts, and deals. Additionally, this platform offers straightforward automations without the need for coding, allowing you to establish smooth workflows for your entire team.
There are two main disadvantages of utilizing monday sales CRM:
- There are no built-in calling and messaging features, which means you have to connect to a business phone solution to automate this step for your sales teams.
- monday limits most of its features to higher pricing tiers, including insights and analytics and its HubSpot and Salesforce integrations.
If you are content with finding solutions for both of these issues, monday sales CRM might provide the user-friendliness and pricing options that meet your requirements.
The pricing for CRM sales on Monday.
- Free: $0 per user per month for up to two seats per account and basic access to monday’s CRM
- Basic: $10 per user per month to access unlimited customizable pipelines, unlimited contacts, unlimited boards, and more
- Standard: $14 per user per month to access integrations with Gmail and Outlook, custom CRM integrations and automations, and more
- Pro: $24 per user per month to access sales forecasting, analytics, email tracking, calendar sync, and more
- Enterprise: Get a custom price to access lead scoring, HIPAA compliance, multi-level permissions, and more
- Less Annoying CRM
Less Annoying is a CRM that prioritizes the key elements necessary for small businesses. By utilizing this platform, you can commence gathering customer data without the inclusion of superfluous features, which may only become necessary as you expand.
Businesses have the ability to manage their pipelines in Less Annoying CRM using lead reports, which can be accessed at any time. Furthermore, they have the option to customize the stages and fields of their pipelines. Additionally, they can view upcoming events and tasks in a calendar format.
One of the standout features of Less Annoying CRM is its single pricing plan, which allows you to access all features on the platform. The cost of this plan increases as your needs grow, giving you the flexibility to utilize everything it offers.
- Contact management tools
- Calendars and tasks
- Leads and pipelines
- Multi-user platforms
- Mobile apps
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To bypass the fact that Less Annoying CRM lacks calling or messaging capabilities for customer interaction, you will need to incorporate a business phone solution in order to automatically record and save calls and texts with your contacts.
The pricing for Less Annoying CRM can be thought of in a step by step manner.
The pricing plan offered by Less Annoying CRM consists of a single option, which is $15 per user per month, granting full access to all features.
- Salesforce Sales Cloud
Salesforce is a major player in the cloud CRM market, having been present in the industry for over 20 years. It continues to be one of the leading providers of customer relationship management software.
Salesforce provides a comprehensive CRM platform that includes features for managing accounts, contacts, leads, opportunities, and sales team automation workflows. However, it does not include built-in calling and messaging capabilities. To record your phone calls and texts with customers, you need to incorporate a third-party business phone system.
The pricing of Salesforce Sales Cloud stays the same, without any information added or removed, by rephrasing the text step by step.
- Starter: $25 per user per month for lead, account, contact, and opportunity management tools
- Professional: $75 per user per month to access pipeline and forecast management, contracts and quotes, lead registration, and more
- Enterprise: $150 per user per month to access workflow automation, opportunity scoring, advanced reporting features, API access, and more
- Unlimited: $300 per user per month to access to-do lists, predictive forecasting, lead scoring, conversation insights, and more
You have two options to enable phone integrations for your Salesforce account. The first option is to purchase API access as an add-on. Alternatively, you can upgrade to their Enterprise (or higher) plan.
Final Thoughts
The CRM software that will be most suitable for small businesses in 2023 is the one that effectively caters to the specific requirements of your business and customer base.
When navigating the constantly evolving technology environment, it is crucial to conduct research on various CRM software choices and verify that the software you select aligns with your present goals and fosters customer success. When making your decision, take into account advanced security features, scalability, integration capabilities, and automation features.
Consider incorporating other forms of business automation to streamline your business operations and allocate more time towards the tasks and activities you are passionate about.
FAQs
Can you explain what CRM tools are?
CRM tools are software solutions that can be utilized to enhance customer relationships. They enable you to streamline interactions with your contacts, particularly those related to marketing, sales, and customer service phone calls.
Can you explain what a mobile CRM is?
A mobile CRM is a system for gathering customer data that is designed to be used on a mobile device. It is usually used in addition to CRMs that have a browser or desktop version. When you install a mobile CRM on your phone, you can easily add, edit, or handle customer information while you are on the move.
Are Microsoft 365, Microsoft Azure, or AWS considered as CRM systems?
Both AWS and Azure are platforms for cloud computing. Microsoft 365 consists of various productivity tools and applications like Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Microsoft Teams. CRM solutions such as OpenPhone, HubSpot, and Salesforce serve as examples.