The Best CRM Software for Small Businesses

Whether you are just starting up, or you have run your small business for decades, effectively managing your existing customer base and nurturing prospects into new customers, is at the core of running a successful business. 

We get it, running a small business is hard. You may not have the budget for a full-featured, complex, and expensive CRM solution. You may even have a one-person sales team, or sales may be one of your many responsibilities. 

If that’s the case, you need to find the best CRM for your small business without breaking the bank. And you’ll want to make sure that at that price, you are meeting all your needs.

Before moving forward to the review of best CRM software for small businesses, let’s first address the most important question of all:

Why do you need a CRM?

Customer Relationship Management Systems are a great way to analyze data from various channels. Channels include your business’s website, social media channels, your customer support logs, and feedback reviews. 

The success of a business, particularly a small business, relies on its customers. That’s why CRM systems are one of the most essential business tools you need to grow your business. 

For example, everyone on your team needs context about every customer’s needs, wants, and current state. This shows how necessary it is to have one central place where all of this information lives.

In a nutshell, here are the reasons why investing in a high-quality CRM tool should be your next top priority:

• Optimized Business Performance: a CRM software can help your business reach new heights once you’re able to understand your customers’ behavioral patterns better.

• Better Customer Relationships: of course, once you get to know your customers on a more personal level, you can forge a much deeper and stronger relationship.

• Increased Customer Retention: the feeling that your service provider cares for your results in staying loyal to the brand for a long time, increasing your customer retention rate.

• Business Process Automation: by using CRM software, you can automate almost every customer-centric process and can make informed decisions faster.

• Exploring New Opportunities: the more you understand your customers, the better you get at identifying opportunities for growth and hence generate more revenue.

• Efficient Reporting and Analytics: with a CRM software in place, a secured customer database is ensured, and automated reports are generated which result in making resourceful decisions.

To help you choose the right CRM tool for your small business, we’ve reviewed the top ones (15 CRMs) right here. Let’s dig in and find the perfect one for you:

1. Zoho CRM

For $12 per user per month, Zoho CRM is one of the most affordable CRM software options for small businesses. 

Zoho includes the full range of CRM functionality, with multichannel tools for process, pipeline, and team management as well as sales and marketing automation. Specifically, with the $12 per month Standard plan, you’ll receive email insights, workflow conversion, custom reports and dashboards, and more.

Overall, if you’re looking for a low-cost or even free CRM software for your small business, there’s no doubt that Zoho is a top choice! The free edition also has CRM essentials like lead generation, documents, and mobile apps to accommodate smaller business owners. 

Key Features

• Live chat for everyday website visitors
• Numerous progress tracking reports
• Lead management to capture and maintain new leads
• Customer portal to communicate efficiently with customers
• Email management to keep customer interactions in check

2. HubSpot

HubSpot is one of the oldest CRM software for small business. It is a beautifully designed, intuitive marketing automation software that comes with a completely free CRM solution. The software helps salespeople and other client-centric workers to effectively manage their customer relationships. 

The platform comes with everything a small business needs, without any added complexities of tricky features that you probably don’t need right now.  Through pipeline management, you can keep track of all your deals and never let anything slip through the cracks.

However, some of the HubSpot plans may seem overpriced for small businesses. But HubSpot’s idea is to pay according to your needs. 

Key Features

• Dashboard for visualizing scheduled deals, appointments, and contracts
• Automatic customer interaction tracker which keeps a record of all emails, calls, and messages
• One-to-one customer chat and a centralized inbox for keeping all conversations in one place
• Pipeline management to monitor all the prospect deals and assigning tasks accordingly
• Contact and lead management features to create new campaigns
• Easy prioritization and recording of daily sales calls to manage them efficiently

3. Insightly

Similar to Zoho CRM, Insightly is a great, affordable option for small businesses seeking a CRM system. With their base plan, you’ll be able to manage your customer contacts, sales, and projects in one place. 

The Insightly paid plans start at $29 per month and offer more advanced tools for components like business intelligence and lead management. Additionally, Insightly CRM software is highly scalable. 

In fact, Insightly is known for its project management focus as well as the usability of their interface. Although the free, two-user plan includes functionality for project, contact, task management, sales pipeline tracking, and bulk email campaigns, their paid plans further extend your capabilities. 

Key Features

• Dashboards to visualize data and measure progress over time
• Lead tracking through activity timeline, emails, and calls
• Workflow automation to create automated business processes
• Bulk emails to send to prospect leads simultaneously
• Multiple third-party application integrations

4. Agile CRM

Agile CRM is great for small businesses who want a whole range of customer relationship management tools. Agile has covered every tiny feature that a business can use starting from document signing to marketing automation.

The elaborate suite of features is designed to fit perfectly with any kind of industry your business belongs to. These features range from basic contact management to more enhanced marketing automation features, and much more.

Key Features

• Store details about 10,000 companies or contacts
• Receive support for tracking emails
• Set lead scoring and custom deal milestones
• Access builder tools for forms, email templates, and website landing pages
• Monitor social media
• 360-degree customer view.
• Contact management software.

5. Pipedrive

As its name suggests, Pipedrive CRM’s primary function is to provide a visual pipeline for deals. It is both reasonably priced and one of the most straightforward CRM services available. 

You’ll be able to get it up and running quickly, and the simple UI will let you spend less time working with the software and more time working on your next sale. And with no contracts required and a clean UX, this CRM is simple enough to jump into using but powerful enough to grow with your sales team.

Key Features

• Fully customizable activities with email reminders and notifications
• Pipeline management to monitor sales. You can also add as many sales stages, activity types, or team members as you want
• Email integration with your contacts and deals to track conversations
• Sales inbox to keep all your sales-related emails in one place
• Visual sales reports representing key performance indicators to better understand the pipeline metrics
• Automated workflows to streamline the team’s sales process and improve productivity

6. Freshsales

The next CRM software that might be the perfect fit for your small business is Freshsales. The tool does not come with a bulky feature set to over-complicate the CRM process for teams. Instead, it allows you to smartly manage your leads and optimize sales in an efficient way, with minimum chaos.

The tool allows you to define territories by customer segmentation so that you can assign the right representatives to the right customers. Furthermore, the dashboard allows team members to directly call the customer from the dashboard without individually accessing deals.

Key Features

• Drag and drop functionality to navigate across the sales pipeline
• Advanced lead scoring to rank the leads on the basis of their behaviors and buying patterns
• Smart forms to automatically add new sign-ups into the CRM software as leads
• Sales campaigns to create and monitor personalized outbound email campaigns
• Interactive pipeline management to keep track of each deal

7. Copper CRM

The Copper Basic plan starts at $19. It is great for contact management. Services with Copper include email integration, opportunity management, and lead tracking. This CRM software has beneficial productivity tools and is particularly beneficial for businesses who want to integrate with the Google Enterprise suite. 

In fact, Copper is the leading CRM for G Suite and recommended by Google It works instantly through seamless integration with G Suite, has a beautiful user experience, and is designed to help teams and businesses build long-lasting relationships.

Key Features

• Auto data fetching that saves data entry.
• Lead management.
• Contact management system.
• Visual pipeline management.
• Task management & alerts.
• G Suite integrations.
• Sales forecasting reports and insights.
• Workflow automation.
• Integrations with Zendesk, Xero, RingCentral, Slack, and many more.

8. Salesforce

As one of the most famous CRM solutions, Salesforce is the leader in the CRM game. It is designed mostly for larger businesses, but the sheer number of features, third-party integrations and add-on options also makes this CRM also ideal for small businesses with diverse and evolving needs. 

Once implementation is complete, Salesforce offers users a beautifully designed product that’s speedy, powerful and highly customizable.

Key Features

• Contact management system.
• Opportunity management to close more deals.
• Lead management.
• Sales insights and forecasting.
• Email integrations.
• Workflow automation.
• Create a customer journey and touchpoints.
• Data management platform.
• Google marketing platform.

9. Nimble

Nimble CRM software is specifically designed for small businesses. It is a simple CRM software that brings together your contacts, sales, communication, and business intelligence in one place. Through the dashboard, you can get a quick glimpse at your sales pipeline, appointments, and deals to make informed decisions.

The plan costs $19 per user/month when billed annually. It comes with 2GB of storage, and additional storage may be purchased in increments of 10GB for $10 each per month.

Users who gave Nimble positive reviews applauded its stellar customer service. Others like that it has an attractive and easy-to-use interface. 

Key Features

• Dashboard to get sales and customers’ insights quickly
• Contact management to keep all your contacts’ information updated
• Prospector feature to discover new contacts’ information
• Simple pipeline manager to keep track of all the deals
• Sales forecasting and pipeline analytics

10. Close CRM

Close CRM is one of the first companies to provide a built-in calling feature. It is a sales-focused CRM for inside sales teams. The aim of Close CRM is to help sales teams close more deals by optimizing their sales process. 

The Smart View facilitates the users to create custom criteria for accessing any kind of information related to leads instantly. This also allows you to reach potential leads in less time.

Furthermore, this CRM software is best suited to your small business needs if you need a CRM with integrated emails and call solutions. The tool allows you to optimize your workflow by giving you an overview of all of your sales activities through a timeline, so you know what should be done next.

Key Features

• Email syncing and tracking with insights.
• Bulk emailing with personalized templates.
• Sales goals tracking.
• Sales employee performance.
• Integrations with Zapier, Zendesk, Wufoo, and others.
• Built-in calling with SMS.
• Predictive dialer to make multiple calls at once.

11. Bitrix24

Bitrix24 is a fairly basic, yet comprehensive CRM solution which comes with all the essential tools your small business needs. It is a collaboration software with complete tools for management, collaboration, and communication.

Additionally, It gives you a unified platform for your files, projects, messages, tasks, and contacts. The calendar view also allows you to easily schedule appointments, book resources, and monitor employee availability without any hassle. 

Key Features

• Sales funnel to keep a check on all the sales processes
• Pipeline management for monitoring deals
• Bookings and scheduling through the calendar
• Multiple custom reports and dashboard for evaluating the performance
• On the cloud and on-premise availability

12. SugarCRM

SugarCRM offers a wide range of features that covers sales and marketing processes. It offers features such as customizable home pages, a new-user “wizard” tool for newbies, a shortcut bar, enhanced-view global search functions and downloadable plug-ins that are perfect if you’re just starting up.

Users who gave SugarCRM a positive review like the fact that it is user-friendly and highly customizable to suit a company’s various requirements. They also said that it has a powerful set of modules and features that are cost-effective and strong customer support for end-users.

Key Features

• Quotes management.
• Sales and marketing insights and analytics.
• Sales forecasting.
• Workflow automation
• Easy customization.
• Mobile CRM apps.
• Create, execute, and track marketing campaigns.
• Project management.
• Sales lead management
• Connect social channels.

13. AmoCRM

AmoCRM has a different approach compared to the tools listed above. Amo allows you to integrate all important channels to a single platform where you can manage all the messages. Amo’s approach makes it different from other CRM tools and makes it perfect for businesses with social inquiries. 

Designed to help sales teams close more deals and increase revenue, this can convert your first-time contacts into leads and, eventually, into customers. It also maintains a centralized database to improve decision-making and tracks your performance to stay on top of your progress and maximize your team’s efforts.

Key Features

• Check sales progress.
• Lead tracking and nurturing.
• Display targeted ads.
• Task and notifications.
• Smart sales analytics.
• VoIP integration for calling.
• Mobile CRM.

14. Capsule CRM

Capsule CRM is more focused on bringing all customer data to one place, so sales teams can close deals mindfully. This CRM is also focused on lead assignment and team management. Capsule offers a contact manager where you can check out all the details of your customers and also track the progress of deals.

The key difference between Capsule and its competitors’ approach to pricing is that with Capsule, you’re dealing with an extremely simple pricing structure – it’s a simple case of using either the free plan or paying $10/month per user.

Key Features

• Track history, documents, tasks, and details of contacts at one place.
• Search facility to gather results throughout the system.
• Task management.
• Sales pipeline management.
• Insightful reports.
• Track sales performance.
• Sales forecasting.
• Track team performance.

15. Less Annoying CRM

Less Annoying CRM is a simple CRM built for small businesses, according to their website. Less Annoying CRM is cloud-based, easily customizable, and provides a dashboard with an overview of contacts, projects, files, and pipeline information. This CRM starts at $10 per user per month.

It is straightforward, simple, and easy to use—which is everything you’d expect from a CRM that claims to be less annoying. It’s a particularly good choice as a CRM for small businesses because it’s so simple in that you can strip everything else away to focus on just managing leads and watching your sales pipeline, with efficient but very basic reporting.

Key Features

• Simple contact management
• Track sales leads
• Set reminders
• Enter and categorize notes
• Pipeline reporting
• Share contacts with your co-workers
• Create contact groups
• Mobile website
• Manage your sales team
• MailChimp integration

There You Have It!

As you can see, there are numerous options to choose from when it comes to the best CRM software for small business. 

To reap the full benefits of CRM, you have to choose one with the features that are right for your business today and that can grow with you as your business evolves. Also, given the role a CRM solution can play in your company’s success, it’s vital to find the right provider who can offer the features and customization capabilities to fit your business needs. 

Think about your company’s growth goals and consider both your short-term and long-term needs when investing in a CRM platform. Keep in mind, a CRM is not only a financial investment, but it is also a time investment for your sales and marketing organization. 

Picking the right system, implementing it, and enforcing best practices around its usage will pay dividends as your company continues to grow and scale.

If you want to explore major factors with which you can quickly cherry-pick the best sales CRM tool for your startup, keep a lookout for our next article: How To Select The Best CRM Software for Your Startup Business

Lastly, for a CRM software consultation, please contact us or leave a comment below. We would be happy to help!