Top 14 Best CRM Softwares (2022): Compared & Reviewed

Introduction

With the advent of the internet, everything is turning global. Businesses can delve into unknown territories. Places that seem out of reach don’t seem far away now.  The age of the internet has brought about global connectivity that exceeds any other form of connectivity.

This connectivity has allowed businesses to grow at a rapid pace and even small businesses have a much higher audience to cater to.

Even though this increase in the audience might seem like a boon, everything has its own downsides. A much larger audience is more difficult to deal with.

Understanding just a group of local buyers is easy, but when your customer demographic is as diverse as it is now, managing this diversity and understanding their needs can be quite tedious.

Businesses also need to pay attention to other daily activities like services, sales, staff activities, reports, etc. It is not just the customer base, but as the company grows, so do its components.

And these components need to work in perfect synergy for maximized efficiency. Keeping track of a company’s inner workings is just as important as keeping track of its customers.

While this task can be fulfilled manually, the error-prone nature of humans can cost millions when the stakes are high. Therefore, a solution is required that offers both flexibility and reliance.

One such solution to this modern problem of managing huge customer bases is CRM software. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management.

As the name suggests, the software is developed to help businesses manage their relationships with their customers. 

A layman might believe that managing relations with customers only means keeping track of your customers but it is more than that. Understanding your own business and making changes to cater to your customer base is also a use case of CRM software.

Using a CRM, you can improve your relations with any individual, be it a service user, supplier, staff member, or customer.

While CRM software isn’t precisely meant for sales, it integrates the marketing and sales tool in the business from human resources to supply chain management and customer service.

With CRM software, you can increase the efficiency of your business while decreasing the load of manual labor on your workers. You are also able to reduce the possibility of errors in your calculations.

It turns out that the world is becoming more and more reliant on the use of CRM systems and if you are running a business, it is a better idea to try and implement a CRM system yourself.

Best CRM Software

After going through all that you must be thinking, “Which one should I go for?” This is confusing and sometimes you find yourself choosing the one that you regret later.

So, here are the 18 best CRM software for you.

1. Nimble

Nimble CRM works with the G-Suite inbox or Office 365. It is a very simple and powerful tool used by a lot of companies. 

The CRM tool comes with a lot of features and it is highly customizable and scalable.

The CRM comes with an email tracking feature that allows users to engage with leads more effectively.

With its high integration, you can connect to apps like Gmail, HubSpot, Mailchimp, and more.

The CRM is also capable of sending out targeted group emails so you reach a bigger audience with its ‘group message’ feature.

It comes with a 14-day free trial period where you can try out the software. Nimble is compatible with mobile phones and has GDPR compliance for high data security and integrity.

Its robust task management system allows you to create and assign different tasks to different team members and it offers a smart contacts app with enhanced widget support, calendars, tasks, etc.

Key Features:

1. Relationship management: Nimble allows you to manage your relations by automatically combining and analyzing your social media connections, inboxes, and calendar appointments.

It keeps a track of all this activity to keep your relations strong.

2. Live profiles: You are quickly able to retrieve contact details and interaction history from the records saved by the CRM.

3. Segmentation: Nimble segments your contacts into different lists based on the different actions that need to be taken over those contacts. This makes the organization of your tasks more efficient.

4. Reminder feature: You get reminders for different things using the pre-scheduled reminder features that keep you on your toes.

5. Pipeline management: It allows you to visually represent your pipelines. Since the brain is more attuned to visual stimuli, this visual representation makes it easier to assess the sales funnel and makes necessary changes.

Pricing: Only one plan available for $25/user/month (billed monthly) and $19 per user per month (billed annually).

HubSpot CRM is a free CRM software that is used by thousands of people around the globe to improve their business and generate higher revenue while minimizing work.

The free version of the CRM comes bundled with a lot of professional tools that you will usually find in a paid CRM.

 The ability to track, capture, and grow leads and that too free of cost is an advantage that every business needs to look into. 

HubSpot offers a variety of different tools for different business requirements through its services like Money Hub, Sales Hub, and Services Hub.

Features:

1. Emails: With HubSpot, you can improve your marketing campaign through personalized and targeted emails. You can track the results from these emails with built-in analytics reports.

2. Contact organisation: You can sync your contacts with the CRM and organize them in a single place.

3. Integration: HubSpot is compatible with over 300 other software to provide you with easy connectivity and higher functionality.

4. Live chat and chatbots: Customers get 24/7 support through live chats and chatbots which support tickets too.

5. Sales pipeline: HubSpot offers a clean visual dashboard to view your entire sales pipeline in a single place. You can track your progress with minimal clicks.

Pricing:

  • Starter: $45/mo
  • Professional: $800/mo
  • Enterprise: $3,200/mo

Zoho CRM is a CRM built for small businesses.

It allows you to keep track of your sales and increase conversion rates.

 Providing a complete view of your business, Zoho CRM is one of the most popular CRM tools on the planet, with 15,000 customers globally.

The CRM offers a 15-day free trial and has a free plan for up to 3 users.

Features:

1. Advanced CRM analytics: The advanced CRM analytics provide a deeper look into the data collected by the CRM and offer meaningful insights to transform your business.

2. AI-Powered sales assistant: Zoho provides its customers with an AI-Powered sales assistant that gives suggestions based on the machine learning algorithms the system implements on the collected data.

3. Performance management: The CRM tool makes the monitoring and management of a business to achieve the performance goals set by a business easier.

It offers tools like territory management, sales forecasting, and reporting which ease the task of managing and keeping things organized.

4. Sales enablement:  You can generate price quotes and even access sales scripts.

5. Process management: Process management allows teams to mark every step of the sales process with sales builder and processing rules.

Pricing:

  • Standard: $12/month
  • Professional: $20/month
  • Enterprise: $35/ month

Freshworks is an AI-based CRM. This means that it provides intelligent workflow and a high level of automation. 

With Freshworks, you can segment your leads based on their behaviors and create advanced lead scoring based on the characteristics and behavior of the lead.

It can integrate with Mailchimp, Zapier, Segment, and other tools. With its RESTful API support, you can create a custom help desk too.

Key Features:

1. Lead management: It is able to convert leads into customers using the power of AI and advanced algorithms.

2. Deal management: With Freshworks, you are given full information about where a deal is placed in a sales funnel.

To maximize the chances of conversion, Freshworks manages, organizes, and optimizes every step in the sales funnel.

3. Tracking and lead scoring: Not all leads are the same and differentiating between the leads with more potential from those with less potential can be quite a difficult and error-prone task. 

4. Auto lead assignment: Assigning leads to specific salespeople requires a good understanding of both the leads and the salespeople.

With its AI-powered algorithm, Freshworks is able to automate its process. It assigns specific leads to specific salespeople automatically.

5. Smartforms: It automatically adds people who fill up a form on your website as leads into your database.

Pricing: It offers 3 plans ranging from $29, $69, and $125 per user per month (when billed annually).

Salesforce is a cloud-based CRM. Its wide customer base includes sales, services, marketing, analytics, and more.

The cloud-based CRM offers 24/7 support that can be accessed via phone, email, or tickets.

Being hosted on the cloud, there is no optimized infrastructure needed to run it, and therefore it is quite fast and inexpensive. 

It is compatible with Linux, Windows, Mac, and Android as well.

It also offers multi-language and multi-currency customer support. Compatibility seems to be one of the strong suits of this CRM.

It also offers extensive third-party integration with the likes of Zendesk, Zuora, LeadExec, and many more. It provides enterprise territory management, a sales CRM, and management of social networks too. This makes the tool highly versatile and useful. 

It has an inbuilt process builder and lead generation tools to convert more leads faster. This process is enhanced by the inbuilt Einstein Lead Scoring that comes pre-bundled with the CRM.

The cloud-based CRM also offers an open API. This allows companies to customize the CRM to their needs perfectly. Using the open API, you can create your custom pipelines to manage the sales funnels just the way you want.

Salesforce offers a 30-day free trial and mass email options to gather more audience and a low effort while saving time.

Key Features: 

1. Opportunity management: Salesforce offers an ‘opportunity management’ module that allows you to identify better opportunities. The more opportunities you can identify, the more deals you’ll be able to finalize.

2. Contact management: The contact management module allows you to track customer history, communications, and media mentions.

This allows you to make changes to your system based on the specific patterns exhibited by your customers.

3. Sales performance management: You can manage your sales performance by setting goals and then updating your goals as the quarter goes by. This allows your team to stay focused on the task at hand and increase performance.`

4. Visual workflow: Instead of writing code, which takes years of practice, you can just drag, drop, share, and track files and updates. This makes the workflow much easier and accessible to a larger audience.

Pricing: The plans start at $25/month and extent up to $1250 per month for a single user.

Pipedrive is a sales-focused CRM. This means that it focused primarily on increasing sales.

It uses AI to automate repetitive tasks and manage leads and sales. The platform has set a name for itself in the industry with its amazing service. 

It offers an AI-powered sales assistant to give you tips and recommendations on increasing performance and saving time.

The CRM offers lead sourcing and unlimited custom fields for customers to optimize the sales for maximum profit.

You can track individual sales calls, emails, and events and you can create custom reports to track revenue estimates and recurring revenue.

Key Features: 

1. Lead management: You can track leads using forms, chatbots, and other forms.

2. Visual sales pipelines: You can create different stages in your pipeline based on the activities you need to perform at those points.

3. Communication tracking: You can set your schedule in real-time by tracking calls, emails, chats, and much more.

4. Mobile apps: Pipedrive is compatible with mobile devices.

Pricing: 

The plans start at $12.50/month per user and extend up to $99 per month per user. It also offers 14 days free trial period to test their services.

Engagebay is another cloud-based CRM that comes bundled with all the features required in businesses like sales, marketing, and finances. The main focus of Engagebay is automation.

Engagebay has a free plan that offers a plethora of features that a small business can use to run their business well and it also offers a free trial on paid plans.

It has one of the most affordable plans in the market. The customer support offers assistance via phone, live chats, emails, and tickets. 

To engage customers, it offers real-time information about all interactions, forms and pop-ups, and lead generation.

The CRM is highly customizable with its extensive third-party integration support with apps like Zapier, Xero, and more.

Key Features: 

1. Email marketing: You can promote your business through the email module with features like A/B testing, auto-responders, dynamic content, etc.

2. Lead generation: It offers an optimized way of generating leads with features like lead capture, nurturing, scoring, etc.

3. Marketing automation: It tried to automate the process of marketing through CTAs, sales intelligence, and much more.

4. Social media marketing: It also offers support for social media marketing.

Pricing: The paid plans start at $8.99/month and range up to $29.99 and $47.99 per month for a single user. They even offer a free trial for a month. 

Nutshell is another cloud-based CRM that is capable of tackling a plenitude of business problems.

The CRM is bundled with all the features a business might require. It used AWS (Amazon Web Services) as its cloud platform.

The CRM software is compatible with mobile devices too and offers easy data import and export options.

The cloud-based software is easy to deploy and reduces the cost of fracture.

With its top-of-line customer support that offers help via email, phone, live support, and tickets, it keeps its user base satisfied.

It provides daily, weekly, and monthly backups and ensures security, data integrity, and regulatory compliance.

Key Features: 

1. Contact management: It offers contact management through automatic contact sync, a centralized database, a business card scanner, and much more.

2. Reporting & performance tracking: You can keep track of your performance and leads on a product-wise basis.

3. Sales automation: It allows you to automate most of the processes for increased efficiency.

4. Extensive integrations: Offers an extensive range of third-party integrations like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Intercom, Outlook, Slack, and more.

Pricing: There are only two plans. The Starter plan cost for $19 per user per month and the Pro plan for $35 per user per month when billed annually.

NetHunt CRM works in collaboration with your Google account. It uses Google services to enhance its own CRM.

 The familiarity of the G-Suite and the functionality of the NetHunt CRM make it an attractive choice.

The CRM is completely integrated with Gmail and offers high integration with third-party applications like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

It is also compatible with mobile devices and customer support through email, phone, and live chat are also available.

Being a cloud-based platform, it offers high performance at a lower price. 

It also offers the option of sending bulk emails and filtering, sorting, and saving your data as per your choice. The software is highly customizable and scalable. The interface is also user friendly.

Key Features: 

1. Customer relationship management: It can manage and track your leads, create records, etc.

2. Pipeline management: It offers pipeline management by picking the right deals and monitoring your success over a deal.

3. Sales cycle management: You can follow leads more effectively and check their status and optimize your efforts.

4. Sales tracking: It helps you track to monitor your sales across different channels and monitor the KPIs of the sales team.

Pricing: 

This CRM offers three plans and it also offers 14-day free trial for all of its plan:

  • Basic: $24 per user/month 
  • Business: $48 per user/month 
  • Advanced: $96 per user/month

Insightly is a CRM that aims to improve your business by long-lasting relationships with customers.

It is compatible with both the major vendors of smartphones, Android and Apple.

The CRM is highly scalable and has flexible calendaring and event management tools available for its customers.

The software has built-in tutorials for those who are new to using the software and the interface is intuitive and user friendly.

You can see the macro/micro view of your complete business anytime using the visual dashboard that tracks important metrics.

It also offers features for filtering and tagging along with email reminders and tracking.

Key Features: 

1. Lead routing: Allows its users to track leads and get the most relevant information for better marketing.

2. Relationship management: Enables users to build strong relations with their customers.

3. Extensive third-party integrations: It can be integrated with apps like Gmail, Dropbox, Outlook, and more.

4. Pipeline management: It allows you to monitor different points in the sales funnel to fine-tune them according to your needs.

Pricing: The plans start at $29/month and extent up to $99 per month for a single user when billed annually.

11. Copper

Copper is a great CRM that is easy and doesn't require training and complicated installations.

It collects data and leads, arranges them automatically, resembling Gmail’s natural assemblage.

It’s among the industry’s top CRM platforms, even recommended by Google. 

This software automates tasks, tracks employee activities, manages multiple sales pipelines at once.

In addition to that, it also joins with other G Suite products allowing you to transfer data much easier and with minimal effort.

Key Features: 

1. Centralized communication: Copper organizes information and conversations, in customer’s profiles. You can use the system’s collaborative nature and keep everyone involved by automating tasks sending and tracking emails, very easily. 

2. Pipeline reporting: Copper sends detailed pipeline reports that help in understanding each practice and its effects.

Its strong reporting ways make your sales approach more efficient because Copper sets dedicated pipelines for each. Copper does all this even if you have a high or low number of clients. 

3. Unrestricted connectivity: Through Copper’s RESTful API, developers can connect it to almost every system. You can also use it from day one with a lot of built integrations.

Copper’s other features also include accurate goal tracking, forecasting, Integrated, ready-to-use VoIP functionality, etc.

Pricing: 

  • Basic: $25 per user, per month. Billed annually.
  • Professional: $59 per user, per month. Billed annually. 
  • Business: $119 per user, per month. Billed annually.

12. InfoFlo

InfoFlo is a CRM program that offers a complete office management solution where the sales managers are in control over their customer database.

It offers a modern suite of tools for project management and is affiliated with leading phone and communication systems that deliver the best client service. 

It also gathers feedback which is useful because you can use it for your research and development.

All the information becomes easier for reporting.

Key Features: 

1. Professional contact management: All your business contacts are managed, tracked, and their information is automatically linked. You will have all the information regarding the contacts displayed on your screen with a single click.

2. Email and calendar management: Your emails and calendar are managed as needed.  It also stores and arranges all your events, tasks, meetings, correspondence, and recordings that matter. 

3. Live social media feeds: InfoFlo allows you to view a live feed of your social media accounts. These live social media feeds keep you informed. You can exchange questions and answers at the same time through several profiles. 

Its other features include tracking growth possibilities and strong data security. 

Pricing: 

  • On Premise: $99, one-time cost.
  • Cloud: $30, per month.

13. Apptivo

Apptivo is a simple and well-connected CRM that was designed for mobiles. Its specialty is opportunity management.

Through this, you can see pipelines of all the upcoming deals and you can tend to the important and necessary prospects as well. 

All your opportunities are transformed into projects, goals, invoices, and quotas, this means the system doesn’t need to re-enter data in the system.

It comes with an open API infrastructure and can be used to find and store new leads through its web-to-lead tracking mechanism. 

In addition to that, Apptivo is customizable allowing you to draft your views, share sections across apps, or add new fields.

Key Features: 

1. Great support: Apptivo’s customer support is always available through all modes, ensuring that all your questions are answered and issues are solved instantly. 

2. Endless custom fields: Apptivo has one of the most customizable systems. You will have complete control over your customer records because you can add and remove custom fields.

3. No restrictions on customer management: Apptivo allows you to involve as many users, roles, and privileges as you can. There's also no restriction on storage, this means you can store as many customer details as you need. 

Capturing web leads, Built-in apps, and converting opportunities are its other features. 

Pricing: There are four paid plans available for this software which are mentioned below. Also, the software provides 30-days trial account.

  • Lite: $8 per user, per month. Billed annually. 
  • Premium: $12 per user, per month. Billed annually. 
  • Ultimate: $20 per user, per month. Billed Annually. 
  • Enterprise: Customizable.

Agile CRM is focused on making your marketing and sales fully automatic. It does so while providing all these on a single platform.

It is the most affordable CRM software as it’s a cloud-based SaaS service. 

Agile CRM has its substantial third-party integration that includes email, billing, customer support apps, etc.

It also allows you to use mobile messaging in the operation and you can send out personalized SMS.

Through Agile CRM, you can create very effective landing pages, these pages will attract more leads and keep those dormant leads. 

Key Features: 

1. Managing projects: The management of projects is done on the same platform. That includes features like drag-and-drop etc. 

2. Marketing email: You can create your personalized emails and send them as per your convenience. Not just that, you can build your newsletters too. On top of that, you can also track and analyze the results they bring in. 

3. Managing contacts: Contacts are managed on a single page. It is very effective and helps in closing more deals. 

4. Scheduling appointments: Agile CRM allows you to share your calendar online and schedules, invites, and follow-ups can be automated. 

Pricing: 

  • Starter: starts from $8.99.
  • Regular: starts from $29.99.
  • Enterprise: Starts from $47.99.

It also offers Free plan for 10 users where you are not even required to post your credit card credentials. 

Things to look for in a CRM Software

1. Ease of use: A CRM software has a multitude of features to run. Using CRM software can be quite daunting if you are not familiar with it.

While choosing a CRM to integrate with your company, it is better to choose one which is intuitive and easy to use for increased efficiency and fewer errors.

2. Integration: One of the most essential features to look for in CRM software is its ability to iterate with your website, phone, email accounts, and other digital spaces.

Easy and robust integration translates into a less faulty system that can be accessed and used anywhere.

3. Revenue tracking: Revenue tracking is one of the basic reasons for which a CRM software is implemented by a company in the first place. A CRM software should be able to track revenue to the minutest of details without any errors. 

4. Role specificity: Newer CRM systems are becoming more role-specific. Your company might not always need all the features that come bundled with industry-standard CRM software.

To reduce unnecessary bloatware, choosing role-specific CRM software is a good option.

5. Security: CRM software collects a lot of data. This data can hold some sensitive information that your business would not want to leak.

Losing data can also make your customers lose trust in your company. Therefore, a CRM software should have robust and tested security.

6. Data collection: CRM software collects data that needs to be analyzed to create insights about the business. Choosing a CRM software that collects the right kind of data without adding too much overhead to your system is necessary.

7. Channel data integration: CRM system should be able to integrate with data channels to better understand where a lead came from.

Information about the origin of a lead allows us to better optimize our marketing funnels and better organize our monitoring strategies by focusing on data that gives us more accurate reflections of our customers and the results of our actions.

8. Automation: Manual work is prone to errors. Even though data is collected and analyzed by CRM software itself, human interference is prone to more errors.

Look for a CRM software that has more options for handling majority of the tasks automatically and removing human interference.

9. Simple visual interface: CRM software has a lot of options available. Navigating through those options can be a hassle if the interface is not intuitive enough.

Having a simple visual interface makes interacting with the software easy, less time consuming, and more efficient.

10. Multiple users: A lot of times, multiple users need to monitor and analyze data from a CRM. Thus, CRM should have the ability to host multiple users at a time for better teamwork and higher efficiency. 

11. API calls: Your CRM should have the ability to make API calls so you can build a more customized architecture that caters to the specific needs of your business perfectly.

12. Marketing: Every CRM software should have top of line marketing tools.

Benefits of CRM Software 

Here are the 10 benefits of CRM software that will help you understand how helpful they are for a business. 

1. Manages communication

Through an effective CRM software, all the communications, internal or external, are managed efficiently. You will have representatives to monitor if they have sent prospects for the resources which were requested.

The rep to rep and the rep to prospect communication allow reps to gather all the information of the customer’s buying journey that includes every interaction, phone call, email, etc. 

2. Automatic data entry

With a CRM software, all the data will be collected and organized automatically within the system. The data includes information like call logs, meetings, interactions, and logging emails, etc.

The system also handles the weighting, visualizing, etc after the reps have updated the deals. 

3. Improves collaborations

All of the teams involved like the different sales and marketing teams, and all of the members of organizations can access the same data hence, collaborations among the team members can be improved. 

4. Organized contact data

CRMs help you to keep all the data assembled and keep track of contacts and their data too. Your reps will see if a contact visited the company website, spoke with another member, or downloaded anything from your site, etc.

All the information like notes, calls, email interactions with their contacts and leads are always trackable within the system. 

5. Saves costs

Even though CRM software is usually costly, you only have to buy it and it’s yours. You don’t have to pay for it monthly.

This gets even more productive and cost-efficient since there is an increase in collaboration. Over time the costs of running a business are lowered because of the enhanced operational efficiency. 

6. Having the same software

The thing about CRM is that once you purchase it, it stays as your organization expands. Your company grows and so does your CRM.

The more your business expands, the more contact information gets organized, more leads get tracked, and more interactions with prospects get recorded, and through all that growth, your CRM grows too. 

CRM assists other teams as well, like customer service and marketing, not just the sales organization. These teams deal with the prospects, according to the information about them, they tailor CTAs and product details for their necessities, customize content for them, and so much more. 

7. Employee involvement increases

When using CRM, employees gain access to the data. They feel empowered and that motivates them to take responsibility and ownership in their everyday work. This way, they get involved more and this helps you out a lot.

8. Makes tasks efficient

With CRM, all the administrative tasks become simpler and a lot of time is also saved. These tasks could be recording conversations, saving contact information, manual data entry, etc.This allows reps to focus and spend their time and efforts on more serious tasks.  

The tasks handled by CRM software don’t necessarily increase revenue in a direct manner, but they allow you and your reps to do so by saving time. They affect the schedule of your sales organization improving your business. 

9. Cross-sells and up-sells 

When you have enough knowledge about customers, their purchase history, and their preferences, it increases up-selling and cross-selling opportunities.

Up-selling is when you recommend upgraded or premium products to customers based on the products they purchased. 

Cross-selling is where you offer inter-related products based on their purchase history. You can recommend products that fit their style, budget, etc thus, satisfying the customer.

Since you will understand your customers' needs and patterns better, your sales team can promote whenever the opportunity arises. 

10. Increases business performance.

CRMs improve business performance because of all the data analysis, understanding customers’ purchase patterns, information stored in the database, etc.

The customer doesn’t have to explain their choices, requirements, etc. since you will already know it through CRM software. 

Through this knowledge, you can effectively satisfy customers, make work efficient and easier. Through CRMs, reps and sales managers can track activities and know what sources are the best lead generators.

This data can help a company to predict the trends in the upcoming months to create sales and make necessary adjustments that cater to those trends. 

Limitations of CRM

It is important to know the downside of things too. So, here are the certain limitations of CRM software.

1. Requirement of training

A lot of training is required especially for large businesses. This also means hiring professionals to train workers and these training sessions might take time from hours to days.

This deprives the company of time that they could use to work and enhance productivity. In addition to that, CRM training is different for staff and managers because of their features. 

2. Security issues

CRM applications can be a threat to security and the company because of the data that’s found in a centralized location. Like what if inaccurate data is added to the system?

CRM is usually secure and can be solved through encryption safeguards, supervisions, and backup. So even if the data is lost there’s always a plan B.

3. Technical support.

Even though many organizations that offer CRM solutions do offer support but it also comes with a price. First, you buy the software and then the costs for support are forgotten. 


So, there are two options left when it comes to CRM support. Contracting the work to someone else or hiring a specialist within the organization.  


Types Of CRM

There are three types of CRM software and they’re further divided into categories. 

1. Analytical CRM: This type of CRM helps you make better decisions about your business by gathering and analyzing customer data which includes monthly recurring revenue, retention rates, etc. It arranges your data in one database which makes it easy to analyze.

Analytical CRM also uses cluster analysis which splits your customer information based on age, state, gender, marital status, educational levels, past purchases, etc., making it easy to identify sales trends.

This CRM helps you find patterns in the past purchases of a customer. Analyzing past trends also helps in knowing the past purchases which in turn will help you predict the demand in the future.

You will know what you need to manage and the performing action basis this information can help your sales target and quota.

This CRM also lets you know what derived the customer to get in touch in the first place, like through an ad or link, etc. It also educates you on how to sell better, and from where your best customers are coming. It keeps identifying patterns for improvement. 

2. Collaborative CRM: This type of CRM arranges customer information and shares it with your external and internal stakeholders like suppliers, vendors, distributors, etc.

Its focus is mainly aimed at customer retention and satisfaction rather than customer acquisition. Collaborative CRM will help you with customer relationships.

These CRMs help in document organization, they keep every document from every team arranged and sorted. It will help you increase engagement between different departments.

The thing about sharing notes across teams can lend you gain huge amounts of information that could help improve your marketing skills. 

When you talk within your community, it helps you understand a lot of things about your customers like the new products your customers might want, how to sell products in the future, what language to incorporate in your marketing materials, and much more.

If you want to place all the efforts on customers across your business, then this one's for you. 

3. Operational CRM: Through this type of CRM, you will be able to know the customer’s journey. These CRMs use sales and marketing automation to save time and make sure nothing goes wrong.

You know about each customer’s interaction with your brand. It helps you get a clearer view of the customer and their profile. You will get all the details of a customer whenever they interact with your company, this will help save time with information organizing. 

Operational CRMs automate leads which tells you, who has more chances of becoming a customer, what leads have the highest priority, and what leads spend the most overtime.

After this information, you will get an idea of what leads to nurture by automation or personal touch. Through Operational CRM, people can be segmented into email funnels based on the data acquired about them.

The information automated could be the customer’s purchase history, account size, interest in products, visits to the pages of your website, interactions with the sales team, etc.

It’s very useful if you don’t know where to start from and want to use lead scoring and win probability. 

How To Use CRM?

CRM software brings a lot of value to your business and it is easy to get started with using one.

This is how you should go about using a CRM:

1. Add sales representatives: The first step is to get all the salespeople on board with using a CRM. Your sales representatives are important in bringing in businesses to generate more sales and thus your sales team is the one that will bring in the revenue.

If your sales team doesn’t buy the idea of using a CRM, then the benefit of adoption will be extremely low. A good strategy is to hire one of the top salespeople to act as an advocate for CRM.

If he/she is using the CRM well, then others will follow suit.

2. Segment your audience: The next step is to segment your sales funnel. Doing this is important as it allows for a more organized way of monitoring your sales and making decisions that affect the specific segments of your sales without interfering with other parts of your business.

The most common way of doing this is by dividing your potential customers into various stages like ‘lead’, ‘opportunity’, and ‘customer’. This is a way of representing them from the company's point of view.

3. Import your contact list: CRM can be used for a lot of different reasons but it is recommended only a single CRM that fits the needs of your business.

Regardless of the type and number of CRM you’re using, you are required to import all your data like the contact list, past deals, and customer information to your CRM.

The most common mode of uploading this data is through a CSV file and almost all CRM systems allow CSV file uploads.

4. Third-Party integrations:  The main aim of a CRM system is to gather as much data as possible through as many channels as possible.

The only way to do it is to integrate your CRM system with third-party software, apps, and websites like Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, and much more.

Marketing, sales, and customer success information should be centralized. After getting the data from all the different sources, the conversion of this data into insights should be centralized and automated for high efficiency.

5. Create a dashboard: CRM systems help in simplifying the process of monitoring and managing your work. This is usually achieved by creating a dashboard that acts as a central hub from where you can take control of everything by making it display the information of your choice or need.

For example, you need to monitor the sales of a certain product ‘P’ in the current month. You can do this by making the dashboard display the intricate details regarding the sales of product ‘P’ in the current month.

The information can be visual or textual.

6. Create reports: Finally, after analyzing all the data from the CRM, you are able to create a report that reflects your success, failures, and goals. Reports help in:Evaluating PerformanceKeeping track of goalsKeeping track of the competition

Conclusion

CRM software is a tool employed by a business that helps it control the interactions with its customers and increase productivity and ultimately, profit.

A CRM software helps in managing almost all aspects of a business workflow like productivity, sales management, etc. CRM software has been so beneficial that the market size of CRM will improve by $82 billion by the year 2025. It currently stands at $120 billion.

Plenty of CRM tools offer different features and it’s important to make sure you understand its types and how CRM works. Only then will you be able to pick the perfect one.

We recommend HubSpot, because of its many amazing features, easy payment plans, and great marketing collection that has helped a lot of businesses. 

But every CRM tool has its own special features. It all comes down to what you find perfect for your work. Make sure you know about the ease of use, payment plans, features, third-party integration, functionality, and more before choosing a CRM. Good luck.

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