15 Best CRM Softwares for Small Businesses

Customer Relationship Management for small businesses is as important as the business itself. This is especially true in a world where ‘customer is king’, and engaging in regular interactions with them is crucial for any small business to grow and expand. This is where CRM software works as a handy tool.

A Customer Relationship Management Software allows small businesses to manage customer interactions and customer data in an easy and simplified manner. With 86% customers likely to pay more for a better customer experience, businesses that rely on quality CRMs are far more likely to succeed in the long-term.

There are three major advantages of using a CRM for small businesses:

• First, it helps with contact organisation, which aids your growing business in giving a clear overview of your contacts, enabling you to run sales processes fluently.
• Second, through sales reporting, a CRM software helps you keep an overview of performance through different metrics such as calls made, which is ideal for managing a sales pipeline.
• Finally, it helps you to categorize your customers into various segments for personalising their experiences and building a better relationship with them.
  

Finding the best CRM software for your small business can be exhausting, especially due to the wide range of options available. Naturally, it follows that choosing the one that suits your business needs and requirements can be daunting. The nature of your small business might be a major factor in determining the CRM you’ll choose, however, these are the three categories in which we have classified our top 15 CRM picks:

Best CRM for Funnel Management

A sales funnel depicts the ideal path that businesses hope buyers take to become customers. The traditional sales funnel has stages such as awareness, interest, desire, and action. However, as customer relationships get more dynamic and complex, specialized CRM software can aid businesses in managing their sales funnels effectively with consistent tracking, and come up with solutions that nurture every part of it. If this is a priority for you, here are our recommendations:

Freshsales

Freshsales CRM enables small businesses to automatically capture website visitors as sales leads and group them according to their engagement on websites.

• You can further assign them to the most appropriate salesperson on your team and thus, reach out to each individual with complete context and track each deal by personalized pipelines.
  
  It’s an intuitive interface executed with the right intent - culminating in a pleasing user experience.

Pipedrive

Pipedrive is a user-friendly CRM specifically designed to be fast and simple. This doesn’t mean it isn’t feature-packed though.

• Its features include mobile alerts and email reminders, easy integration with Google applications, Trello, Zapier, etc.and email templates.
• Additionally, it also provides sales forecasting and trend analysis, backups and encryption to keep data secure, drag and drop tasks as customers follow the sales funnel.
  

SalesForce

SalesForce is another popular CRM widely used by businesses.

• For small businesses, SalesForce offers a basic edition called Lightning Essential. This provides users with an advanced contact manager that includes features like email integration and follow-up reminders.
• Additionally, it also includes options for integrations with other applications and customisation.

Drip

Drip is excellent for small businesses, particularly ecommerce setups.

• It packs in a powerful and feature-rich interface that is very easy and simple to use for any business, though if you’re not an ecommerce store you’d probably want to steer clear of its customisations.
  
• Popular features include easy email list segmentation, content customisation, automatic revenue attribution, and eCommerce user tracking.

Deskera Sales -  CRM software for Small Businesses

Deskera Sales is a Customer Relationship Management Software provides businesses with a single view of their customers, assists in the automation of critical sales processes ranging from leads qualification to promotional campaigns, and enables the key decision makers to implement customer-centric strategies easily and ensure effective sales management.

• Deskera’s CRM campaigns help in running and managing campaigns, administer email marketing campaigns, and exporting campaign lists in multiple formats.
  
• The tool also aids in searching, tracking and converting leads and defining lead activities by using Deskera’s Lead Capture Forms.

In short - Deskera CRM helps small businesses delight their customers with exceptional and personalised experiences, and enables them to sell more.

Best CRMs for Marketing Management

Marketing Management is an important function provided by several CRMs. Small businesses often struggle with targeted marketing, and some CRMs enable them to manage their marketing plans, campaigns, and sales effectively, in a hassle-free and convenient manner. Here’s our pick of the best CRMs from this perspective:

Zoho

Zoho offers various editions that can be used to meet the CRM needs of small businesses.

• It offers a range of sales and marketing features, and also enables users to track website visitors.
• Additionally, there’s lead scoring, sales signals with pop up notifications about leads, and much more.
• It also provides the option to integrate with other marketing tools and has built-in security measures to keep your data safe.

Hubspot

Hubspot is fairly popular among small businesses due to the free version it offers, which includes all the basic features provided by most CRMs.

• It allows small businesses to keep a track of important activities, including contact and company profiles, assigning and tracking of deals, and management of data in a detailed dashboard.
• The dashboard is visible to all team members, with a detailed view of overall team activities and filters to gleam through the data.
  

As a bonus, it can even be integrated with popular apps such as SalesForce and Shopify, allowing seamless data exchange between your marketing and sales teams.

NetSuite CRM

NetSuite is a powerful CRM designed to cater to the needs of small businesses across various industries such as manufacturing, retail, and wholesale distribution.

• While it arguably features a dated interface when compared to the competition, it does offer a real time, overall view of all customer interactions.
  
• This includes customer service management, marketing automation, and partner relationship management.

EnagageBay

EngageBay offers an all-in-one marketing and sales CRM solution.

• It packs in features for sales management, lead generation, email marketing, and marketing automation, all within a single package.
  
• These ensure effective marketing campaigns that are easy to design, implement and track.
  
• A social media management feature is available as well, fairly useful for small businesses to reach out to their potential customers.
  

Nimble

Nimble CRM is an excellent tool for small businesses that want to combine contacts, emails, and social media interactions in one, consolidated place.

• Its user-friendly interface is easy to navigate and provides to-do lists, shows top or key deals, and a ‘rules engine’.
  
• This rules engine assists in predicting relevant contacts and activities based on user behaviour.

Best CRMs for Workflow Management

Workflow Management using CRMs allows users to automate simple and complicated business processes. Workflow processes run in the background or in real-time and can sometimes require user input. If business process automation is a priority, consider these options:

Salesmate

Salesmate enables small businesses to speed up sales processes and offers customers a personalised experience.

• Contacts can be managed effectively and all sales related activity can be easily tracked.
• While this is an offer most CRMs would make, Salesmate is also great for executing email campaigns and tracking them to measure their effectiveness.
• Its built-in phone functionality is an added convenience.
  

In other words, it provides small businesses with flexibility and scalability.

Capsule CRM

Launched in 2008, and has become quite popular in recent years.

• Its ease of use is among the key features that enable small businesses to track both relationships and sales pipelines.
  
• Available on desktops and mobile, with a user interface that is broken down into five major sections (dashboard, people and organisations, sales pipeline, calendars, and cases).
  
• Capsule allows up to 2 users on its free offering.

Streak

Streak is an excellent CRM for Gmail enthusiasts as it is technically a browser plug-in, and works great for smaller teams. These teams can work directly out of their Gmail inbox.

• The integrations allow for easy tracking of views, sending out bulk emails, separate email threads, and scheduling emails.
  
• If you’re looking for more intensive functionality, you may want to consider other options. But if power email usage is a priority, this may be by far your best bet.

ConvergeHub

ConvergeHub is a cloud-based CRM that works very well for small businesses. This is primarily because they don’t have to deal with multiple repositories and have one central platform.

• It also enables users to organise campaigns, store contact lists, and manage all sales activities.
  
• With a dated interface and no particular USP however, many users may want to give it a pass in favour of more compelling alternatives.

SugarCRM

SugarCRM provides a special solution for small businesses - called Sugar Professional.

• This platform offers customer experience solutions to help create a simple but consistent experience.
  
• It is customisable and can be modified according to the needs of the business and different customers for optimal engagement.
  

It claims a user base of over 2 million, including clients such as IBM and Audi.

Have you made your pick yet?

These are our top picks for the Best CRM Software for Small Businesses for 2020. CRM software allows small businesses to effectively manage customer interaction and customer data and helps them in accessing essential business information that is crucial for maintaining customer relationships in the long run.

Of course, depending on your preference, you may stick to one category of tools when making your decision. When seeking to pick the best CRM for your small business, go for one that focuses on the most critical aspects of business you want it to improve.