Top 5 Best CRM For Small Business in 2021 — LitExtension
By LitExtension
Introduction
The most challenging thing for every small business is to grow. As you strive for this growth, you will gain more and more customers.
When your business has a certain number of buyers or clients, it’s high time to bring your business and customers closer together by streamlining the workflow and organizational processes. That’s when CRM becomes extremely valuable to small businesses to make sure everything runs as smoothly as possible.
Besides, another important factor for eCommerce businesses is choosing a suitable platform to build the website. While running your online store, if you feel that your current eCommerce platform is not meeting your requirements, you can decide to automatically migrate the platform to a new one with LitExtension — #1 Shopping Cart Migration Solution.
Without further ado, let’s get started!
Overview about CRM
What is CRM?
CRM (Customer relationship management) is a process by which a business or other organization manages its interactions with customers.
CRM can be used for current, previous, or potential customers. It can provide you with a detailed picture of your buyers’ journey. Everything is in one place: a simple, customizable dashboard that shows you a client’s previous interactions with you, the progress of their orders, any open customer support issues, and more.
The CRM system aggregates data from a range of different communication channels, including the company’s website, phone, email, live chat, marketing materials, and social media. They allow businesses to learn more about their target audience and how to best meet their needs, thus retaining customers and driving sales.
What to look for in a CRM for small businesses?
Reasonable cost: Small businesses and startups are constantly looking for ways to save money. You may still be working with a limited budget and must allocate your resources as efficiently as possible. As a result, the CRMs we’ll mention here are all reasonably priced or even free, making them ideal for small-scale companies.
Customization: You’re probably operating your company as a small business owner. So, we recommend looking for customization capabilities that allow you to customize CRM software to exactly meet your business requirements.
Usability: If you’re running a small business or startup, spending time learning a new complex platform is never a good idea. Ease of use and simplicity should be decisive factors.
The optimal platform is the one that requires minimal training, easy to use, quick access and included necessary features for a business.
Integrations with other tools: It’s always beneficial to use software that can integrate all of your tools and combine the data to produce the ultimate result. Every department can use the data in their own ways and avail of their tools to create new strategies.
Customer support: You should find CRM software with good customer support features so that you can quickly get assistance if there is any trouble. It will save a lot of your time instead of having to find your own way to solve the problem.
Best CRM for small business in 2021
In this part, we would like to introduce the 5 best CRM for small business. We will focus on their key features, the cost you have to pay for using them and some information about the customer services.
Now, let’s see what they are!
HubSpot
HubSpot is a great CRM for small organizations that are growing or want to scale their operations. The free plan includes basic capabilities for contact management, lead communication, appointment scheduling, and service ticket management.
With more than 875+ integrations and the ability to create custom apps, you can freely customize HubSpot as you wish to fit your business. HubSpot is currently one of the best free CRM on the Internet.
Key features
Custom workflow automation: HubSpot CRM is able to automatically create tasks based on prospects’ activities. You can manage and perform them to enhance your team’s productivity.
Landing page builder: HubSpot provides a drag-and-drop editor tool for creating landing pages. You can also choose from HubSpot CRM’s library of templates if you don’t know where to start designing your website.
If you’re new to landing pages, we have a guide video here to help you:
Built-in telephone and email communication tools: With features like free meeting scheduling, live chat, email templates, and click-to-call functionality, connecting with prospects has never been easier.
Built-in analytics: This feature makes it easier for you to figure out which emails, websites, offers, and traffic sources are most effective at converting visitors. Determine how often leads visit your site before purchasing, see trends in how users browse your site and use this information to increase conversions.
Pricing and Support
HubSpot currently offers a variety of particular options to match your company’s needs. You can start with HubSpot’s free version and upgrade to premium packages starting at $45 as your business grows.
Besides, all CRM Free accounts are supported by the Community and Starter accounts are supported by 24/7 support via email and chat.
Salesforce
Salesforce is one of the most popular and commonly utilized CRM programs on the market. Luckily for smaller businesses, Salesforce provides a basic edition called Lightning Essentials. This package contains an advanced contact manager with email integration and follow-up reminders for the user. It also has a lot of integration and customization options.
With Salesforce CRM for Small Business, your sales associates can access all customer information in one place, save time with automation, and make deals from anywhere, at any time. Additionally, managers may more confidently change procedures, track progress, and forecast future metrics.
Key features
Here are some outstanding features of Salesforce Essentials CRM for small businesses:
Artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities: Increase the amount of time you spend with consumers. CRM software assists in the elimination of redundancy and the automation of common processes by providing an efficient alternative to manual sales tools.
Robust email marketing tools: Customers can be served by email, phone, live chat, social media, and a self-service support center. Furthermore, email data is synced with CRM automatically to develop contact profiles.
Mobile application: The mobile app can do nearly all of the activities available on the online application, allowing you to keep track of sales pipelines, handle prospects, and connect with other team members every time and everywhere.
Excellent solutions for report customization: This plan has the ability to customize visualization options to easier manage deals and opportunities. Also, Salesforce Essentials integrates with commonly used business applications like DocuSign, Dropbox, Zapier, and Active Campaign.
Pricing and Support
The cost for the Essentials plan is $25 per month. You can try all the packages free within 14 days to decide whether to use this plan or not. Salesforce also provides 24/7 support via email and chat.
Salesmate
Salesmate is a CRM system for salespeople who want to spend less time learning new apps and more time selling. It’s an ideal CRM for small enterprises and startups, and it may also be used in the real estate as well as construction industries.
This platform is always evolving. With a more customized and dynamic dashboard, it has significantly improved its analytics and reporting. Salesmate has also improved its mobile app and included new capabilities for phone calling and deal management.
Key features
Sales intelligence & reports: Gain better insight, have a better understanding of your sales funnel and team’s performance to develop your business. Then, you can control your reps with actionable insights and comments.
Sales automation & sequence: You can increase productivity and profitability by eliminating repetition. Also, Salesmate helps you build reusable sales handouts and automated cadence to bring more sales to your store.
Sales pipeline & activity tracking: Focus and clarity in your purchases help you win every deal. Plus, contacts, transactions, sales, and discussions are all tracked in real-time, allowing your team to focus on sales and meeting quotas.
Prospect & lead engagement: With a personal touch, you can reach out to more prospects. Furthermore, by targeted emails, messages, calls, and follow-ups all automated and personalized, your store will convert more and more prospects into your customers.
Pricing and Support
All of Salesmate’s plans come with a 15-day free trial. You may use it for your business right now with the Starter plan, which costs $12 per month per user. Alternatively, you can select a plan with more useful features.
In addition, each plan offers live chat and email help 24/5, as well as document support, video, and a community.
Zoho
This software can also be used by small businesses because of the diversity of editions available. In terms of sales/marketing tools, Zoho has a lot to offer, including website visitor tracking, lead scoring, sales signals (including lead pop-up notifications), and more.
Currently, more than 250,000 businesses of all sizes and sorts utilize Zoho CRM to great success all over the world. Zoho has won key honors in the CRM technology area and is continuously rated highly by both reviewers and users after more than two decades of delivering world-class software technology to the worldwide business community.
Key features
Omnichannel communication: Your customers and prospects should be able to reach out to you through whichever channel they want. Zoho CRM allows your business to receive, manage, and reply to messages from phone, email, social media, and online chat, all in one central site.
Automate your sale: You can save more time for other work with Zoho CRM system. It will perform your entire business automatically and eliminate time-consuming, repetitive tasks. Additionally, make the most of every new lead by streamlining your lead nurturing process.
Analytics: You can keep track of critical performance indicators, such as present trends and projections for the future. Plus, strong real-time analytics will help you make better business decisions.
Conversational AI: With the help of Zia, your AI-powered sales assistant, you can rapidly find any information you need from your CRM data. You can also receive notifications, task reminders, and recommendations for the optimal times to contact your leads based on previous successful interactions.
Pricing and Support
You can buy Standard, Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate plan with the price starting from $14 to $52 per month. Zoho also offers a 15-days free trial to make sure of your final selection.
When it comes to customer support, you can participate in Zoho CRM user community to get updates from the Zoho CRM team and partners. Zoho only offers 24/7 support via live chat and call with Enterprise plan.
Freshworks
Freshworks CRM (formerly Freshsales) allows you to automatically gather and categorize your website visitors as sales leads based on how they interact with your site. Assign them to the appropriate members of your sales team. Reach out to each lead with full context and use personalized pipelines to track deals.
Currently, over 40,000 businesses trust Freshworks software to run their business. Sellers have the ability to increase their sales with Freshsales by personalizing your engagement and shortening your sales cycle. Freshworks also provides Freshsales iOS and Android apps to keep your sales going from mobile.
Key features
Use built-in email and phone powered by Freshcaller. With just one click, you can make more calls, send targeted emails, and reach out to more and more prospects.
Find the best sales leads. Freshworks identify your high-potential leads or those who show signs and actions that indicate they’re ready to buy.
Customer 360° view: You can learn everything to know about your clients thanks to this feature. Plus, you are able to combine sales and support functions together by Freshdesk Integration and from there upsell and cross-sell to your existing customers.
Manage sales pipeline better: You can easily track the progress of your deals by visual sales pipeline. Furthermore, from the deal card, you can create tasks, schedule meetings, send emails, and make phone calls.
Pricing and Support
Freshworks provides both free and paid versions. You can select one among them with the highest price for Enterprise package is $69 every month. Furthermore, every plan includes 24/5 support through phone, chat and email.
FAQ
Is a CRM worth it for a small business?
Yes, it is. CRM software, at its most basic level, is a database of customer interactions that organizations use to assist their sales teams and service representatives in increasing sales and improving customer experience.
Who uses CRM?
CRM systems are typically utilized by sales, marketing, customer service, and service departments. A solid CRM application will usually interact seamlessly with external systems that your organization’s other teams may employ.
Is CRM hard to use?
As mentioned above, CRM for start-ups or small businesses will be designed with user-friendly interfaces in mind. So you don’t have to worry about how to use CRM for your store.
Conclusion
In brief, this article has presented the 5 best CRM services for small businesses along with their outstanding features, pricing and support as well. We hope that you will have the right answer to the question: Which is the most suitable CRM system for your business.
For more detailed information, don’t hesitate to contact our support team. We are available 24/7 via support system, email, and live chat.
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