Struggling to grow your business? Need help getting it organised? You need a CRM system then.
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management system and can help you keep track of everything including your customer data, prospect data, sales and bookings.
A CRM can help you with your sales, marketing, communication and project management.
Best CRM for Small Business
We have tried and test many different CRMs and give you our honest opinions on the best CRM for small business and startups.
Hubspot
Best enterprise CRM
If you are looking for a CRM that is powerful and includes useful features like sales forecasting, email marketing and lead management then it probably is Hubspot.
With Hubspot you are able to use intuitive visual workflows and create automated campaigns across email, social, ads and your website. You are also able to send tailored, personalised and automated emails that will automatically segment and nurture leads.
Automate your sales process and save time with the sales automation features. Automatically send out invoices to leads and integrate with your favourite payment processors like Stripe or Paypal. Get actionable sales analytics that give you an insight into so you can look at where to improve and better your team.
You can also use the service tools such as live chat support, ticket routing and knowledge base for the most asked questions from your customers and clients. Hubspot also gives you the ability to have bots to interact and communicate on your teams behalf and direct your users to a rep or a knowledge base article.
Hubspot has a free plan which you can access all the some of the features of the CRM but it does have limitations. You can complete 10,000 deals per company and store 1,000,000 contacts.
The next plan up is the starter plan which is $45/month which includes the basic CRM, marketing and sales tools. The highest plan is $5,000/month which includes the complete advanced marketing features, CRM, customer service and operations software.
While Hubspot is certainly expensive it is only recommended for established businesses.
EngageBay
Best affordable CRM
A simple to use CRM that doesn’t skip any of the must have features. EngageBay has all the features you’d expect from a great CRM like marketing automation and email marketing.
A useful feature that EngageBay includes is the landing page builder. You can use the landing page builder to easily generate leads for your business. With it’s drag and drop interface you can simply create the landing pages how you want with any technical knowledge.
EngageBay also includes autodialer software (depending on the plan) which allows you to make and receive calls from your EngageBay dashboard. You’re able to have powerful call centre features such as call recording & playback as well as call reports so you can stay on top of your team members and look at areas of improvement. You even get alerts for missed calls.
The social suite allows you to stay on top of your social media channels by being able to schedule and post on various social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagtam. You can post updates, content and promotional offers easily all from the EngageBay dashboard without having to switch from screen to screen. As well as that you get the insights from the analytics to show you which posts are performing and how many people you have reached.
Included with EngageBay is also push notifications. Push notifications can help increase retention of your users and customers and when someone turns push notifications on from their browser or mobile you’re able to send them offers, information and content so you can nurture leads and turn them into customers.
EngageBay have a free forever helpdesk and livechat support software that you can use without any limitations even if you don’t go for any of their paid plans.
Now lets come to pricing, they are surprisingly one of the most affordable CRM companies. If you go for their all in one package (sales, marketing, service & CRM), their entry plan is free with 250 contacts and you can send out 1,000 emails. The next plan is their basic plan which is $12.74/month per user on a 2 year plan.
This includes using features like the social suite, email templates, video marketing, email marketing and being able to manage your contact database. The most expensive plan is $84.99/month per user paid biennial. With the pro plan you get everything you get in the basic plan plus marketing automation, unlimited emails and contacts, landing page builder, autodialling software and push notifications.
Monday
Best Visual CRM
The CRM by Monday.com helps you stay on top of things. If you have an important project or a lot of people working on many different projects, this makes it easier to with the project management features. It has an intuitive and easy to use interface and integrates with a near endless amount of tools such as Google Calendar, Zoom, Gmail, Zapier and much more.
It includes powerful features you can use for all aspects of your business including marketing, sales, development and HR. Using the Gantt charts you can easily visualise the largest of tasks and simply assign tasks to different team members. Monday CRM makes it a piece of cake to read data and make those data driven decisions to grow your business
With Monday CRM you can activate automations without being technical or having any coding knowledge. For example if you have a sales call, you can automatically send the client an email and invoice and once done add their details to the client list and their workload assigned to them team member who will deal with them, all automatically.
With it comes to pricing Monday Sales CRM is very reasonable. It has a free limited individual plan with two free seats, 5GB of storage and over 200 templates. If you want to go for the Basic or Standard plans they range from $10 – $14 per user per month. However if you want something larger and have a bigger business than you may want to go for the Enterprise plan, which gives you advanced automations, analytics and more. For this though you will need to contact the sales team for a custom quote.
Zoho
Best Versatile CRM
Zoho offers you a streamlined solution to bring all your marketing, sales and project management needs in all one organised software.
Whether you are in sales and you want to nurture leads and turn them into customers through marketing automation and help predicating upcoming sales or there is a massive project that your business is undertaking and you need something to help you organise everything and give you processes.
Zoho CRM comes with a 15 day free trial for you to try out everything and see if it fits within your business. There are four plans that Zoho offers which include Standard, Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate.
The Standard Plan starts at £12/month which allows you to create basic automations and allows you to optimize your sales cycle. The most expensive plan being the Ultimate Plan which offers advanced automations such as autoresponders and sales automation as well as allowing you to customize the CRM.
Pipedrive
Best for small businesses
CRM designed for sales people. If you have a business that is predominantly sales and sales is your main focus, then the CRM system by Pipedrive will help you to take your sales to the next level. Not only will it help you stay organised with leads management but also it helps you with the follow up process.
Pipedrive will identify which leads are better prospects so you can assign your sales team to get in touch with them and with all your Facebook, email and WhatsApp inboxes synced in Pipedrive, it’s just that much easier.
With the powerful marketing automation tools you are able to setup drip campaigns that, you can write once and it will send to your emails. You can also nurture new leads coming in by setting up a drip campaign and automating the nurturing process.
And with the drag and drop builder and the beautiful email templates, creating emails has never been simpler! With over 250 integrations the CRM also connects with many of your favourite tools and apps as well.
Pipedrive has a 14 day free trial which you can try out all the features without linking a credit card to it. Pipedrive offers 4 different plans which include Essential, Advanced, Professional and Enterprise. The Essential Plan is priced at £14.90/month which gives you access to basic lead management tools and 3,000 deals.
The Enterprise Plan which is priced at £79.90/month and offers unlimited deals (deals are leads that are undergoing sales process), advanced automations and integrations.
Freshsales
Best CRM that is simple to use
Allow your team to stay productive all the time with Freshsales CRM. With Freshsales you are easily able to collaborate with other team members. Freshsales know that you need to be able to communicate and work with other team members to complete tasks in the business, that’s why it makes it easy as possible to collaborate with others.
You are able to share whatever you are working on including support tickets and sales deals. And you don’t have to switch from task to task, you can just focus on the task on hand as Freshworks gives you the team collaboration tools.
Security can be a big priority when it comes to CRMs that is why Freshsales comes with Neo Admin Center. This gives you the security protection making it so it is difficult to break in with key features like single sign on and two factor authentication.
You can also keep tabs on all activity made using the CRM so you are able to track any suspicious activity and link it to any specific team member.
Whether your customers are on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or email, with multichannel marketing you can target them where they are and keep in touch with them on their preferred platform.
The basic plan of Freshsales is free and that gives you basic access to the CRM including managing and tracking customer records and connecting with your prospects through phone or email. The other three plans they have are Growth, Pro and Enterprise.
Growth is priced at £12/month per user and gives you access to the visual sales pipeline, bot chats and the ability to message and respond on WhatsApp.
Mailtag
Best for sales teams
Mailtag is an awesome Chrome extension for email tracking, automatic follow up and scheduling.
If you have a sales team, they need Mailtag. Mailtag allows you to track if your prospect has opened or read your email, if they have clicked a links in the email or if they just haven’t got around to it. This gives you the perfect data to follow up with your prospects.
Not only that but Mailtag allows you to schedule your emails and send them at the perfect time that your prospects may open their emails and it allows you to create automatic follow up emails.
With the super useful analytics your able to see from a glance how your emails are performing, how many are being read, how many are being clicked and ultimately how many people are taking action.
You can also see how your sales team is performing in terms of how many emails they are sending and how many deals they have close.
Mailtag is only $9.99/month per user when you pay annually. While it might not be a fully blown CRM or have as many features as some of the others in this list, it is still a powerful software that is definitely worth it!
Gist
Best easy to use CRM
Gist has all the features you might expect from a great CRM including email marketing, live chat and customer database capabilities. With it’s intuitive and simple user experience, it can be very easy to use.
A great feature that Gist has is a chatbot that helps you with your live chat and emails so even when you are offline your chatbot can help nurture and convert those leads into sales. The chatbot or GistBot (as Gist call it) can even schedule appointments for you with your clients. This way they don’t have to wait for you or your team to come online and can get an answer to their question straight away.
With Gist you are able to capture website visitors emails and convert them into customers much easier through their templates of popup and signup forms. Then emails can be triggered to be sent through marketing automation that will be sent automatically to nurture the emails and turn them into customers.
Just like other CRM’s on this list, Gist can integrate with so many other tools and apps like Zapier, Shopify, Stripe, Facebook, Google Analytics, Zoom and more. These integrations just make the CRM that much more powerful and useful for your business.
To get the basic version of Gist it is free. The only downside is that the free version will be very limited on what you can do. You will be missing a lot of the automation features and integrations if you want to use the ‘free forever’ plan.
However the professional plan is only $29/month and you are able to use multiple users while you also have the ability to integrate your Facebook and Twitter inboxes to it as well as the automations and chat bots.
The next plan would be $99/month for unlimited users and this would be more advanced automations, email forwarding, video calling and advanced chat bot.
If you’re not sure whether Gist is for you then you can take it for a test drive with a 14 day free trial.
Keap (formerly Infusionsoft)
Best all in one CRM
Keap is an all in one CRM platform with some powerful capabilities. Not only does it have some powerful features but it is also simple to use. The people at Keap know that not everyone is a CRM expert so they have kept the user interface easy to use.
With the automated lead flow management you can be sure your leads are taken care of from the get go. You can set up email flows that will automatically get emailed to any leads. This allows you to nurture leads quicker and spend less time managing leads.
If you’re an ecommerce store you can use their invoicing and payment features to send out invoices to your customers and include one click upsells and cross sells to increase your average order value and you can include promo codes to encourage customers to purchase all in real time.
Keap keaps it simple (see what we did there!) with it’s pricing plans. They have three you can choose form Pro, Max and Max Classic. The Pro plan is $129/month and includes email marketing, SMS marketing, lead management and appointment among other features.
The Max plan is priced at $199/month and includes all features the Pro plan includes as well as analytics and upsells. The plans also depend on how many contacts you have and the amount of users you have.
For the Max Classic plan you would have to get in touch with the sales team. They do also offer a 14 days free trial.
GoHighLevel
Best for generating leads
GoHighLevel is a CRM aimed at agencies and has some fantastic sales and marketing features. With GoHighLevel you are able to capture the leads, nurture them and close the deals with there many intergrations.
From their platform you can nuture leads by sending automated SMS messages, voicemails, Facebook messages and emails.
Then you close the deal by scheduling appointments, sending invoices and tracking everything all from the comfort of the GoHighLevel CRM!
The platform includes a full scale page builder so you can build websites and highly converting landing pages. You also have to capture leads through surveys and forms.
If you are an agency or even a service based business, GoHighLevel can help your business with client acquisition, lead management and follow up, client fulfilment and call tracking among other things. GoHighLevel can be a potential game changer for you!
GoHighLevel can do your SMS marketing, email marketing, sales funnels, appointment booking, social media scheduling and post among other features.
This CRM can also integrate with all the popular apps such as Facebook, Stripe, Paypal, Shopify, WordPress and more.
You can get a 14 day free trial of GoHighLevel to try it out and see if it is a good fit for your business but then going forward the basic plan would be $97/month. The next plan up would be $297/month and with this plan you can use unlimited accounts and you would be able to use your own branding on GoHighLevel.
What is a CRM system?
A customer relationship management (CRM) system can help you to store and organise your customer data. It can also help you to communicate with your customers through the use of email and SMS marketing. Think of it like a online storage cabinet but better.
The CRM’s of today have better functionalities such as marketing automation, sales automation, and chatbots so you can automate the repetitive tasks in your business and do the more important tasks.
Think of a CRM as a complete platform to nurture a lead and turn them into a customer through a buyers journey. Customer Relationship Management systems can help your business make data driven decisions and help connect different departments like sales, marketing and finance together.
Another great thing about CRM’s is that they have many integrations with the plethora of apps out there that extend there functionality. The versatility they have make them great to connect up with VOIP telephone systems, help desk software, inventory management software, email clients and more.
Why Your Business Needs a CRM?
You might think your business is different and it doesn’t need a CRM. You couldn’t be further from the truth. Industries like agriculture, consulting, financial services, vehicle maintenance, hospitality, recruitment, real estate and healthcare to name a few would all need CRMs.
A CRM can help all businesses and can help you manage and collect data. With the data you can then make data driven decisions to analyse and grow your business. You can track the journey of the buyer by tracking each method of communication so you can enhance the customer experience.
Not only can a CRM help you with organising and making sense of data but it can help you turn a visitor into a loyal customer through the use of email & SMS marketing and marketing automation. Once the visitors have signed up to your emails, you can send them a series of pre-written emails to nurture them and guide them through the buyers journey and so they become a customer.
Once they are within your customer ecosystem you can upsell or cross sell them other complimentary products.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing Automation is one of the features of a CRM. In short, marketing automation automates routine marketing tasks without the need of human intervention. Marketing automation can help you nurture, educate and move your leads further in the sales process without the need for your sales team.
Using marketing automation you can personalise each message sent so each lead will feel a more human touch and not only that but you are able to segment each lead. So for example if they bought a certain product they would be segmented to a different group and be sent different messages to those who haven’t bought anything.
An example of marketing automation can be automating the whole lead process, so from the moment a lead signs up to your emails for a free trial they can be sent a series of pre-written educational emails or SMS on what the product could do for them.
Other examples of marketing automation include a sending a series of welcome emails, reminder emails, birthday messages and newsletters.
Summary
Over the years, CRMs have become more advanced, more sophisticated and have more integrations. Using a CRM you can organise your business, better nurture and convert your leads and make data driven decisions to grow your business.
When deciding on which CRM you want you’ll want to see if it does what you want it to do. First you’ll have to decide what purpose you want the CRM. For example is it for your sales team, to make sense of your customer data or as a booking or inventory management system.
The top three CRM software we recommend is Keap, Pipedrive and EngageBay as they are an all in one CRM that are both versatile and affordable.
