17 Best CRM Software Platforms

Using CRM softwareis undoubtedly one of the best ways to manage a company’s interaction with current and potential customers. With customer relationship management software, you can efficiently analyze a customers’ history with your company to improve business relationships, specifically focusing on customer retention and ultimately driving sales and increasing revenue. 

Before you invest in CRM software, make sure it has adequate solutions to help you solve your business’s daily problems. 

When choosing a CRM software, these are some features it should have:

  • Seamless scalability and accessibility
  • Not limited to sales
  • Customization and reporting
  • Ease of use
  • Integration with ERP and other apps
  • Support

These features are very important

There are a ton of CRM software available today. To make your job easier, I have curated an extensive list of 17 best CRM software that’ll work for any business. 

Let’s get started.

What is the Best CRM Software?

The best CRM software is designed to help you efficiently manage your customer data, drive growth sales, and build and manage a healthy long-term relationship with customers. 

With excellent CRM software, you would be able to centralize all of your customer data so that anyone in the company can access the information in one platform. CRM makes it easy to track every client’s engagement with your company and also provides vital analytics you can use to efficiently market your brand.

Here are my top picks for the best CRM software:

1. HubSpot CRM

BEST OVERALL & FREE CRM SOFTWARE

HubSpot CRM is the best CRM software available if you have little or no technical knowledge on how to get started with customer relationship management. It is an easy to use CRM platform that comes with free business and marketing resources, Ebooks, guides, templates, and more to help you grow.

HubSpot comes with a free CRM regardless of the kind of business you do.

HubSpot CRM for Sales Leaders

HubSpot CRM comes with a ton of features that are very useful for sales leaders to help get full visibility into their sales pipeline in real-time. With detailed reports, you would be able to monitor the performance of your team and also track sales activity. 

HubSpot’s CRM platform allows unlimited users/data, and up to 100,000 contacts with no expiration date. 

FEATURES YOU’LL LOVE

  • Company insights
  • Reporting dashboard
  • Deal tracking
  • Pipeline management
  • Prospect tracking
  • Meeting scheduling
  • Email tracking and notifications
  • Live chat

HubSpot CRM for Salespeople

HubSpot CRM comes with a ton of sales productivity tools that are very useful for salespeople. The software helps you have full control of your entire sales process; organize and sort deals, create tasks, and meet deadlines.

FEATURES YOU’LL LOVE

  • Contact management
  • Pipeline management
  • Deals & tasks
  • Company insights
  • Email templates and scheduling
  • Email tracking and notifications
  • Gmail & Outlook integration
  • Meeting scheduling

HubSpot CRM for Marketers

HubSpot CRM doesn’t come with features only for salespeople. It comes with free tools for lead generation so that you can organize, grow, and nurture your database. With their CRM platform, you have access to tools that help you convert your visitors into qualified leads. 

FEATURES YOU’LL LOVE

  • Ad management
  • Live chat
  • Chatbot builder
  • Forms
  • Send bulk emails for free
  • Built-in analytics
  • Email marketing
  • Reporting dashboard
  • Contact website activity
  • Contact management

HubSpot CRM for Customer Service Teams

HubSpot CRM comes with simple tools to help you manage all of your team’s communication in one place. With their platform, you would be able to view, manage, and reply to every customer communication regardless of the marketing channel

FEATURES YOU’LL LOVE

  • Ticketing
  • Live chats & chatbots
  • Conversation inbox
  • Team email
  • Time-saving productivity tools
  • Email templates
  • Ticket closed reports
  • Time-to close reports

HubSpot CRM for Operation Managers

HubSpot CRM comes with easy-to-use tools and integrations to help increase the efficiency of your team. It offers features to operation managers to help arm their salespeople with time-saving productivity, prospecting, and sales tools. There are over 300 integrations you can connect to HubSpot CRM software. 

FEATURES YOU’LL LOVE

  • Third-party integrations
  • Forms
  • Prospect tracking
  • Productivity tools
  • Contact management
  • Deals & tasks
  • Reporting dashboard
  • Company insights
  • Built-in reporting

Pricing Packages

Start using the CRM that’s 100% free, forever — with something for everyone.

Based on its features, ease of use, extensive support and training, and the fact that the CRM is free, HubSpot CRM is my #1 pick this year.

You can get started with HubSpot to test out its features today. 

Additional Reading:80 Best Sales Tools

2. Pipedrive

Pipedrive is a cloud-based customer relationship management software that makes it easy for businesses to manage their sales pipeline. It comes with useful features to help you monitor every action involved in converting a potential customer into a successful deal. The CRM solution can be accessed directly from desktop browsers or mobile apps.

Pipedrive CRM comes with a robust dashboard and sales reporting tool to help you track each activity in your sales pipeline, analyze sales data, monitor your leads/targets, and also generate visual reports. 

Features You’ll Love

  • Allow you to manage sales and deals in your pipeline 24/7 using custom chatbots and webforms
  • It allows you to track calls, email, and contact history
  • Use artificial intelligence to eliminate stress by automating repetitive administrative tasks
  • Access to in-depth reports to help you measure your performance ensuring that you reach your business goals
  • Privacy and security features that help you monitor how your business data is being used
  • Mobile app and integrations with your favorite sales-boosting apps

Pricing Packages

Pipedrive offers a free 14-day Advanced plan trial. Full access. No credit card required. Here’s a breakdown of their paid plan:

  • The Essential plan starts at $12.50 per user per month, billed annually
  • The Advanced plan starts at $24.90 per user per month, billed annually
  • The Professional plan starts at $49.50 per user per month, billed annually
  • The Enterprise plan starts at $99.90 per user per month, billed annually

If you are looking for an effective CRM software with built-in tools to help you grow your business, then you should check out Pipedrive.

3. Keap

BEST CRM FOR ECOMMERCE BUSINESSES

Keap, formerly called Infusionsoft, is a powerful contact management software application that comes with built-in robust ecommerce, sales, and marketing tools.

Note that Keap is not a lightweight solution and is better suited for large companies rather than small businesses. The CRM also requires that new users would sign up for an onboarding training which normally costs up to $1,999 per user. So you should put that into consideration before making a decision.

Features You’ll Love

  • It comes with a contact management tool to easily record every contact interaction, create reports on sales activities and even the number of people that visits your site daily
  • Keap comes with a powerful sales automation tool that allows its users to create and share custom quotes to clients from the app, and a sales pipeline management feature for project management across your sales and marketing teams
  • While most CRM uses third party integrations for ecommerce capabilities, Keap comes with an in-built ecommerce tool that is great for businesses that sell online. 
  • The platform also integrates with hundreds of apps

Pricing Packages

It starts at $0 for your first month on all packages! 

  • The Keap Grow plan starts at $79/mo which includes 500 contacts and 1 user
  • The Keap Pro plan starts at $149/mo which includes 500 contacts and 1 user
  • The Infusion plan starts at $199/mo which includes 500 contacts and 1 user

You can purchase additional users for $30/month.

4. Capsule CRM

Capsule is a simple and yet powerful CRM platform that helps businesses manage their customer contact, monitor sales, and also build stronger customer relationships. It is an easy to use CRM software that is designed for small to medium-sized businesses especially those that make use of Google Apps. 

Capsule CRM comes with several features to help you manage your sales pipeline, track communications, identify business opportunities, and manage a large customer database easily. 

Features You’ll Love

  • It comes with a contact management tool to help you organize your contact information all in one place. You can easily monitor and track customer conversations. 
  • It allows you to manage your sales pipeline. You can also track potential sales with a customer, such as bids, deals, or proposals. 
  • Get actionable insights and reporting on sales data to pipeline insights and activity stats to help you make informed business decisions
  • You can segment Capsule into Teams so you can have a clear view of what different teams are working on and also monitor their progress
  • Capsule integrates with popular apps like Google Suite, Mailchimp, Xero, and More
  • You can access Capsule on both Android and iPhone

Pricing Packages

Capsule CRM comes with a 30-day free trial to test out its features. Here’s a breakdown of their paid plan:

  • The pricing plan for Teams is $36/user per month and allows up to 100,000 contacts
  • The Professional plan is $18/user per month and allows up to 50,000 contacts
  • It also comes with a free simple version that allows up to 250 contacts. 

If you are looking for a simple but powerful customer relationship management software, then you should check out Capsule CRM

5. Salesforce CRM

Salesforce CRM is a cloud-based CRM software that offers applications that fit the needs of small, mid-size, and enterprise organizations, with a focus on sales and customer relationships.

The Salesforce CRM platform comes with a range of features to help you manage your leads, automate marketing, and also manage your contacts. The application would help you monitor your sales performance, track sales leads, manage your customer accounts, and also provide post-sale customer services. 

Features You’ll Love

  • Salesforce offers a cloud-based contact management system that gives you a complete picture of your customers behavior regarding your product and services
  • It also comes with an opportunity management feature that gives you a detailed view of different stages of a particular deal which would help you decide your next move. It also comes with ready-made templates so you can email your clients with ease
  • Salesforce CRM also comes with a quote management tool to help you create quotes to show your customers the prices of the products and services you offer. 
  • It comes with a unique feature called Einstein Analytics that offers business intelligence and also curates data from multiple sources to help business owners have a comprehensive and up-to-date view of customer and sales prospects. 
  • They also offer sales forecasting, email integration, and intelligent collaboration tools to help project teams work together in one platform

Pricing Packages

  • It has an Essentials plan that cost $25 USD/user/month billed annually
  • The Professional plan costs $75 USD/user/month billed annually. 
  • The Enterprise plan costs $150 USD/user/month billed annually.
  • The Unlimited plan costs $300 USD/user/month billed annually.

If you are looking for a way to sell faster and smarter then you should check out Salesforce CRM.

6. Zoho CRM

BEST FREE CRM FOR SCALING YOUR BUSINESS

Zoho CRM is an online Sales CRM software that manages your sales, marketing, and support in one CRM platform. It helps businesses effectively engage with customers, build customer relationships, and also grow their revenue.

Zoho CRM allows you to conduct sales meetings and presentations, organize webinars and get webinar reports, and offers powerful AI tools that help you track sales and performance metrics. 

Features You’ll Love

  • Real-time notifications
  • Reach customers across every channel: telephone, email, live chat, and social media
  • Streamline your lead nurturing process
  • Marketing automation
  • Powerful, real-time analytics
  • Measure and manage your sales performance
  • Track key performance indicators, including current trends and future predictions
  • AI-powered sales assistant called Zia that would help you find any information you need from your CRM data
  • Deployment, consultation, onboarding, and training programs to help you get started
  • Integrates with other business apps you use daily

Pricing Packages 

  • The Standard plan starts at $12/user/month billed annually
  • The Professional plan starts at $20/user/month billed annually
  • The Enterprise plan starts at $25/user/month billed annually
  • The Ultimate plan starts at $45/user/month billed annually

Zoho CRM also has a free edition with three free users and essentials. This CRM is perfect if you have a home business. 

7. Insightly

TOP FREE CRM SOFTWARE FOR MANAGING PROJECTS

Insightly is the #1 CRM software for Gmail, G Suite, and Outlook users. It is a great tool to help you manage your business relationships. Insightly CRM would help keep track of a contact’s information and prospective customer data all in one place.

Insightly helps the sales team to establish strong relationships with customers; allows marketing teams to keep track of their projects; and allows managers to keep track of employee’s work. 

Features You’ll Love

  • Insightly comes with a contact management tool that helps you record, manage, and see the relationship between your contacts
  • Their sales management tool allows you to keep track of every stage of your sales pipeline. It uses Kanban views to help you visualize your workflow easily.
  • Manage your pre- and post-sales work with features like milestones, pipelines, and Kanban views
  • You can also create reminders, to-do lists, call logs, and tasks
  • It also comes with advanced reporting and dashboard that gives you visual insight on important business metrics.

Pricing Packages

  • The Plus plan costs $29 per user/month, billed annually
  • The Profesional plan costs $49 per user/month, billed annually
  • The Enterprise plan costs $99 per user/month, billed annually

It comes with a free plan so you can test its features before paying any fee. 

8. Netsuite

NetSuite CRM is a powerful CRM solution that provides businesses of all sizes with a complete view of their customers in real-time. The platform helps companies to monitor all the stages of lead management all the way to fulfillment and post-sales support.

One of their unique features is a knowledge management base. This feature allows businesses to publish and organize helpful content and document so that both customers and employers can find information about a product, service, department, or topic on their own. 

Features You’ll Love

  • Integrated contact management
  • Marketing automation for better sales
  • Track employee workflows
  • A campaign management tool to help you keep track of all your marketing campaigns
  • Android/iPhone apps to help you keep track of leads in real-time
  • Real-time visibility into day-to-day marketing activities.
  • Sales Forecasting feature that helps companies predict sales with real-time forecasts
  • Time tracking
  • Sales force automation

Pricing Packages

  • Contact them to get a quote 

9. Nutshell

Nutshell is a web and mobile customer relationship management service that helps sales reps win more deals. It comes with fast onboarding and powerful reporting to help businesses monitor their sales pipeline. 

Features You’ll Love

  • Nutshell comes with a sales automation platform that allows you to put time-wasting administrative tasks on auto-pilot and focus on building customer relationships
  • It also has one-click integrations with MailChimp and Constant Contact to help you send messages to your prospects at the right time
  • It comes with reporting and performance tracking to help you instantly view your sales performance.
  • Sales forecasting to help you estimate future sales
  • Monitor lead volume and identify your best lead sources
  • Mobile alerts to keep you in the loop any time your customer needs you
  • Pipeline management that includes a board view, list view, map view, and chart view to let you visually manage your pipeline. 

Pricing Packages

It comes with a 14-day free trial you can first check out.

  • It comes with a Starter plan that starts at $19 per user per month
  • The Pro plan starts at $39 per user per month

10. Microsoft Dynamic CRM

Microsoft Dynamic CRM is a flexible solution that helps marketers improve customer journeys, help salespeople drive personal engagement with customers, and also help customer service reps provide effortless service through any channel.

Features That You’ll Love

  • Run multichannel campaigns featuring email marketing, web content, and events
  • Personalize the buyer experience by customizing customer journeys based on user engagement
  • Prioritize leads using multiple lead scoring models
  • Marketing automation
  • Build your sales pipeline with high-quality leads and prospects
  • Engage your customers through multi-channel service options
  • Use data analysis and predictive care to resolve any issues quickly
  • Use customer contextual data to create upsell or cross-sell opportunities
  • Use in-app learning options to onboard new agents
  • Real-time dashboard to measure utilization
  • Unified scheduling agency

Pricing Packages 

The pricing for Microsoft Dynamics CRM is pretty complicated so I am just going to list it out. 

  • The Professional tier plan costs $65 per user per month (recommended for sales professionals and customer support teams).
  • The Social Engagement Professional tool starts at $75 per user per month (provides tools for social listening).
  • Sales Productivity tool that costs $105 per user per month. It combines Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, Office 365, and Power BI.
  • The Marketing and Microsoft Social Engagement Enterprise tool cost $125 per user per month.
  • The Enterprise 360 plan costs $200 per user per month. 

Note that before you can sign up for Microsoft Dynamics CRM online, you must have a minimum of five users.

11. Bitrix24

BEST ALL-IN-ONE FREE CRM SOFTWARE

Bitrix24 is a customer relationship management (CRM) and lead management software for small and mid-size businesses. Bitrix24 CRM helps businesses centralize all collaboration and communication in one platform. 

Bitrix24 gives you a unified platform for files, projects, messages, tasks, and contacts. It offers solutions for CRM, tasks and projects, calendar and sharing, social network, file sharing, sales team management, email, and HR management. 

Features You’ll Love

  • Bulk email
  • Calendar sharing
  • CRM
  • CRM reports
  • Daily planner
  • Email notifications
  • File sharing and versioning
  • Task reporting
  • Time management
  • User profiles
  • Bitrix24 offer over 30 tools which include PM applications, marketing software, as well as internal communication tools
  • Instant messaging
  • Real-time communication tools
  • Unlimited workgroups and user groups for your entire organization
  • Human resources management system and HR tools
  • Printable Gantt charts and visual project management

Pricing Packages

Special Plans

  • The Start+ plan starts at $12/month for all users
  • The CRM+ plan starts at $34.50/month for all users
  • The Project+ plan starts at $34.50/month for all users

Business Plans

  • The Standard plan starts at $49.50/month for all users
  • The Professional plan starts at $99.50/month for all users

12. SugarCRM

SugarCRM is a cloud-based customer relationship management system. The platform offers sales force automation, Mobile CRM, marketing campaigns, customer support, Social CRM, and reporting. 

SugarCRM empowers your marketing, sales, and services teams to collaborate across the entire customer lifecycle for more meaningful, memorable experiences. 

Features You’ll Love

  • Capture leads by creating conversion-focused landing pages, emails, and forms with intuitive, drag-and-drop builders
  • Marketing automation platform to help you drive sales
  • Built-in advertising and social tools
  • Personalized communications
  • Advanced Analytics and a powerful BI-grade reporting module
  • Real-time push notifications and alerts.
  • Effortlessly map out each individual customer journey
  • Sync calendars
  • Track emails
  • Monitor social media activities

Pricing Packages 

  • Their most expensive plan is the Sugar Market plan that starts at $1000
  • The Sugar Sell and Sugar Serve plans start at $80 per user per month, 10 user minimum, billed annually
  • The Sugar Enterprise plan starts at $85  per user per month, 10 user minimum, billed annually
  • The Sugar Professional plan starts at $52 per user per month, 10 user minimum, billed annually

It comes with a free plan for the Sugar Sell plan. 

13. Agile CRM

BEST FREE CRM WITH MARKETING CAPABILITIES

Agile CRM Software is a powerful yet affordable Customer Relationship Management (CRM) with sales and marketing automation for small businesses, ecommerce, SaaS, Call Centers, and Real Estate.

Agile CRM is an all in one CRM software. This means that you can automate your sales, marketing, and customer service in one platform. It is very easy to implement and contains a ton of modern features and integrations. 

Features You’ll Love

  • It is a cloud-based SaaS service that is mobile-ready
  • Single page contact management
  • One-click calling, voicemail automation, and call scripts
  • Appointment scheduling and follow-ups
  • Drag and drop task lists
  • Project management software
  • Gamify sales with ramped up competition
  • Marketing automation
  • Landing page builder
  • Social suite
  • Email marketing features with analytics
  • Mobile marketing
  • Email tracking
  • Help desk and knowledge base
  • Ticketing
  • Improve customer relations by analyzing feedback
  • Integration with several other business apps

Pricing Packages

Agile CRM has a free plan that you can check out. It serves 1000 contacts & companies. This is a quick summary of their paid plans:

  • Their Starter plan cost $14.99 monthly and serves 10,000 contacts and companies
  • Their Regular plan cost $49.99 monthly and serves 50,000 contacts and companies
  • The Enterprise plan cost $79.99 monthly and serves unlimited contacts and companies

14. Less Annoying CRM

BEST CRM PLATFORM FOR SMALL BUSINESSES

Less Annoying CRM is a simple CRM built specifically for small businesses. It is designed to be simple and only takes a few minutes to set up. It is also one of the cheapest CRM platforms and comes with great customer service. 

Since it is designed specifically for small businesses, Less annoying CRM is affordable, easy to understand, and less annoying than most CRM with tons of features.  

Features You’ll Love

  • Contact management
  • Calendar and tasks
  • Leads and pipelines
  • Work with multiple users
  • Easy customization
  • Mobile access
  • Log email conversations
  • Easy importing
  • Daily agenda emails
  • 256-bit encryption
  • One-click export
  • Free phone and email support

Pricing Packages

  • They have just a single price plan that goes for $15 per user per month. There are no pricing tiers on Less Annoying CRM. They offer a free trial so you can test out their features. 

15. Streak

BEST CRM FOR GMAIL USERS

If you use Gmail a lot in your business then you should check out Streak. Streak is an amazing CRM for Gmail users. The CRM platform lives in your Gmail inbox, which means you don’t have to log into any other apps to manage your contacts and sales. All you need to do is install the Streak extension and you are ready to go.

Features You’ll Love

  • Custom views of your pipeline
  • Customize your workflow
  • Easy import and export
  • Smart input types like numbers, lists, tags, formulas, and more
  • Available on mobile
  • Set upcoming tasks using Today widget
  • Automatically logs calls
  • Send contacts to your phone

Pricing Packages

  • It has a Free plan for individuals that want to try out Streak for an unlimited period of time
  • The Solo plan costs $15 / user month
  • The Pro plan costs $49 / user month
  • The Enterprise plan costs $129 / user month

You can try out their Pro Plan for 14 days without adding a credit card or you can use their free plan forever. 

16. Really Simple Systems

BEST CRM SOFTWARE FOR SALES FORECASTING

Really Simple Systems provides small businesses with a sales forecast report to help them automatically calculate weighted and unweighted revenue opportunities. It gives an overall view of sales based on time in the pipeline and the probability of closing.

Features You’ll Love

  • Contact management
  • Sales pipeline management
  • Sales quotations
  • Tasks, events, and calendars
  • Email integration
  • Reporting & analytics tool
  • Lead management
  • Campaign management
  • Marketing automatic
  • Lists and segmentation
  • Case management
  • Service level agreements
  • Case reports
  • Seamless integration with other business apps

Pricing Packages

  • The Free plan costs $0 for up to 2 users. It is free forever
  • The Starter plan costs $14 per user/month (billed annually)
  • The Professional plan costs $30 per user/month (billed annually)
  • The Enterprise plan costs $46 per user/month (billed annually)

Really Simple Systems comes with a free trial. 

17. Flowlu

BEST FREE CRM SOFTWARE FOR FINANCIAL RECORDS TRACKING

Flowlu is a business management software that offers features such as CRM, project management, invoicing, finance management, and team collaboration. Where it beats most CRM is its ability to create quotes, process invoices, accept payments, and track transactions. 

Features You’ll Love

  • Project management
  • Operate tasks in Task Manager
  • Financing and invoicing software
  • Run comprehensive expense reports
  • Team collaboration software
  • Cloud-based CRM
  • Internal knowledge base software
  • Create a backlog in minutes
  • Online messenger
  • Simple system search to help find any information
  • Schedule your meetings and follow-ups
  • Time tracker
  • Automatic server backup
  • TLS encryption

Pricing Packages

  • The Free plan cost $0 for up to 2 users
  • The Team plan cost $28 per month billed annually for all users
  • The Business plan cost $59 per month billed annually for all users
  • The Professional plan cost $119 per month billed annually for all users
  • The Enterprise plan cost $239 per month billed annually for all users

They offer a 14 day free trial on the full-featured subscription plan. 

What Is CRM Software?

If you own a business that sells a product or service, customer relationship management (CRM) is an integral part of your daily schedule. 

To properly manage your relationship with customers, you would need tools to automate the process. This is where CRM software comes into play. But before we look at what CRM software is, we need to first define CRM. 

Customer relationship management is any strategy, process, or tool that helps a business to better organize, manage, and access customer data. To properly manage your business relationship with customers, you would need a reliable CRM system. 

What is a CRM software or system?A CRM system or software is any platform that connects the different departments in an organization, from marketing to sales to customer service, and allows them to organize their workflow, activities, notes, and metrics in one system. 

An advantage of CRM systems is that every user has direct access to all of the business customer data in real-time. Not only does a CRM system allow for effective collaboration across departments, but it also helps businesses to provide their customers with much better service; like personalized, one-to-one customer journeys. 

What Are The Benefits Of Using CRM Software?

Here are some benefits of using CRM software:

1. Better knowledge of your customers

With CRM software, you get to store all your customer information in one place. Not only do you get access to the basic information like customer’s name, email address, website, social media accounts, and postal address, but other important business information like what stage the customer is in the sales cycle, the relationship of the customer to other contacts in your database, the language they speak and much more. 

With all this information, you would get an in-depth knowledge of your customer. This would allow you to better personalize your communication with the customer. 

Also, with the help of CRM software, you can save all previous communications; live chats, messages, invoices, email exchanges, sales, and customer service requests that you have had with the customer. 

2. Better segmentation

A CRM platform makes it easy for you to break down data into easily digestible categories. This segmentation is very essential for sales and marketing teams where they usually have a ton of data coming in from several sales and marketing campaigns. 

With the aid of a CRM, you can create segmented lists to handle several aspects of a project from customer marketing campaigns, account-based marketing, financial records tracking, lead gen monitoring, and analyzing your sales process. 

3. Better customer retention

If you are interested in keeping your customers happy then you should invest in CRM. CRM systems provide businesses with the resources needed to find, nurture, and retain customers. 

For example, a CRM system would remind you about appointments or when to send follow up emails. It would also notify when to reach out to customers you haven’t contacted in a while and perhaps feel neglected. 

This should interest you because it costs 5 times more to acquire a new customer than to retain a new one. 

4. Better anticipate customer needs

To be able to effectively cross-sell or upsell to customers, you must first be able to anticipate the customer’s needs. With CRM, salespeople have access to customer interaction history through the entire customer journey allowing them to anticipate customer needs.

When you have access to customer interaction history, you would be able to identify how they became customers in the first place, their buying habits, what they bought and when, and the kind of product preference they have. This knowledge would allow you to come up with better offers that would entice them. 

5. Better communication

CRM systems come with ready-made templates that allow you to communicate with customers faster and better. You get access to customizable ready to use templates, proposals, quotes, documents, newsletters, invoices, etc. 

Another way CRM improves communication is that you can draft emails and SMS you want to send to customers months in advance. 

How To Choose The Best CRM Software For Your Business

Choosing the best CRM software for your business can be challenging since there are a lot of options out there. Making a wrong choice might put your business at a disadvantage. 

Here are some steps you can take to choose the best CRM software for your business. 

1. Identify your business current needs

Before you choose a CRM solution, identify the current needs of your business. There would be no point investing resources in a CRM that does not offer the exact features that would enable you to reach your business goals.

Here are the three main features you should look for in a CRM software:

  • Contact management
  • Pipeline management
  • Reporting and analytics

2. Involve your sales team in the decision process

Your sales director should have the final decision on which CRM solution you would end up investing in. When figuring out which CRM solution to use, first talk to your sales team. Ask them what features they would require to enable them to perform their duties effectively. 

3. Read reviews online

Before you make any purchases online, the wise thing to do is to read reviews about the product. Getting feedback from other customers would help you make informed purchasing decisions. You can use review sites like G2Crowd and Capterra.Â

4. Take the software for a test drive

Most CRM software comes with a free trial. I recommended that you take full advantage of that free trial to see how the products work. Most products have amazing features on paper but do not work perfectly in-app. The app might also come with a ton of great features and you might not like the UI. So, to ensure that you enjoy your investment, take the software for a test drive. If you enjoy using the software during the test period, you can then pay for the paid packages. 

Best CRM Software – Summary

There are a ton of CRM solutions in the market, and they all have their strengths and benefits. In this article, we have seen the Best CRM software along with its features and pricing. We have looked at paid and free CRM software for small businesses, financial records tracking, sales forecasting, managing projects, and scaling your business. 

Among all the tools mentioned, I recommend the HubSpot CRM software. Not only does it offer detailed CRM packages for sales leaders, salespeople, marketers, customer service reps, and operation managers, it is also FREE.

Which of these CRM solutions would you check out? Is there any tool that you think should be added to the list? Leave your thoughts in the comment section. 

If you plan on launching an online business, you can check out my review on the best podcast hosting services, best productivity tools, and link tracker software.