To successfully give your team the tools they need to level up your company’s sales and revenue, you must find the right customer relationship management (CRM) platform. That’s why we compiled this list of the best CRMs for small businesses in 2024.
Finding the best online CRM software for your small business is challenging, especially with many platforms to choose from. Our list will help you narrow down your options.
And if you’re ready to work with a CRM tool designed especially for small businesses looking to grow, say hello to Nutshell. Equipped with a user-friendly interface and one-on-one support team, Nutshell makes driving sales hassle-free. Get started with your free trial today!
Keep reading for a detailed breakdown of the best small business CRM software!
What are CRM tools used for?
A CRM tool is like an address book for thousands of your closest friends. It does more than just store your customers’ contact details and information—it also helps your marketing, sales, and customer service establish and nurture relationships by providing a pleasant customer experience throughout their journey.
CRM tools help businesses to:
Identify opportunities: Do you have current satisfied customers who are likely to re-purchase? A CRM can spot trends and find sales opportunities for your team.
Store customer information and transactions: The CRM saves every transaction, so anyone from your team can reference it when needed. For example, let’s say a customer asks about a particular feature in the product they purchased. Your customer service team can find their past purchases by looking at their profile.
Track your leads and sales performance: Monitoring the health of your pipeline is crucial if you want to measure the success of your campaigns. Doing so also lets you know if you should change your strategies.
Should a small business use a CRM?
Aside from increasing conversion rates, CRM software can offer several benefits to help improve team efficiency, productivity, and sales. With a good CRM, you can expect the following benefits:
Better collaboration across different teams: CRMs allow different departments to work together to address your customer’s needs, encouraging teamwork. They can share customer information so everyone’s on the same page.
More efficient workflows: With all your customer data in one place, all your customer-facing teams can work together seamlessly to better serve your customers.
Informed decisions: Do most of your qualified leads come from a specific channel? A CRM tool can help you analyze your best-performing strategies, campaigns, and channels. As a result, you can make decisions backed by data.
Improved communication with customers and leads: With the help of historical data about your customers and communication tools available in your CRM, you can improve your interactions with your customers and leads.
Customer retention: A CRM enables you to nurture relationships with your customers by understanding their needs, staying in touch with them, and even getting their feedback through surveys. The result? They remain satisfied customers.
Increased revenue: CRMs not only store and analyze your customer data. By helping you make informed decisions with your strategies, it ultimately enables you to increase your sales and revenue.
Different types of CRM tools
Businesses have different CRM needs, so it’s best to identify the suitable CRM for your company. Let’s look at these three types of CRM tools:
1. Operational CRM
This CRM type helps you with your operations related to serving your customers. It involves your marketing, sales, and customer service teams so they can better support your customers and prospects.
Sales automation: This variety of CRM can automatically assign leads to your sales team members and inform them of their lead confidence.
Customer service automation: An operational CRM enables you to automate your customer service efforts through a self-service option or a help center where customers can turn to for their concerns.
An operational CRM is best for almost any business focusing on improving its overall customer experience.
Want to streamline your workflows? An operational CRM can help you organize your customer data and reduce time spent on doing manual tasks.
2. Analytical CRM
A CRM is a repository of your customers’ data and interactions with them. If you want to take customer data storage to another level and use the information to improve your business, an analytical CRM can help you.
This type of CRM helps businesses process the customer information they’ve gathered. Some of the analytical CRM tools’ key features are:
Customer analytics: Do you want to analyze lead and customer behavior to discover patterns before they purchase or churn? This analytics feature helps you assess customer profiles and behaviors and spot patterns.
Channel analytics: This feature lets you determine your customers’ preferred communication channels and the channels where most prospects operate.
Marketing analytics: Identify opportunities for your business with this analytics feature. It also lets you measure your campaigns’ performance so that you can measure your success and performance.
Sales analytics: This analytics feature enables you to forecast your revenue accurately. It can also allow you to track your sales performance to know if you’re hitting your targets or must adjust your strategy.
3. Collaborative CRM
Do you want your marketing, sales, and customer service teams to share information about customers? Collaborative CRMs help you do just that and more.
This type of CRM enables different departments to address your customer’s needs. Perhaps the customer called your hotline regarding their sales transaction. Your service team can go through the customer’s profile and help them with their concerns, whether it’s about a sales transaction or a follow-up service inquiry.
The 14 top CRMs for small businesses
Let’s dive into our list of the top CRMs for your small business. Use this handy list to skip ahead to any of the CRMs highlighted below:
Support: One-on-one support via email and live chat at no extra cost
Mobile app: Yes
The number one pick on our list of the best CRM tools for small businesses is Nutshell. Nutshell provides small to medium-sized businesses with a complete all-in-one CRM solution, so you don’t have to worry about spending your budget on multiple platforms for all your needs.
This CRM platform is user-friendly and hassle-free. Give your team all the tools they need to drive more conversions successfully with a host of compelling features, including:
Contact management: Reduce manual data entry with Nutshell’s contact management features. You can export your lead and customer data by importing your customer data to Nutshell. Our mobile app even lets you upload customer data by taking a business card photo.
Sales automation: Nutshell can automatically update your prospect’s lead confidence. You can also set up email drip sequences so your sales team spends less time creating emails.
Pipeline management: Want to see how many leads and customers you have in a particular location? You can get a bird’s eye view using the map view.
Reporting and analytics: This handy feature lets you track your leads and forecast sales. You can also see how your leads are moving through the funnel so you can adjust your strategy if needed to meet your targets.
Collaboration tools: Team members can tag someone else if they need their input or help regarding a customer’s concern, breaking the silos of working per department.
Protecting tools: Nutshell IQ is a complete toolkit for finding more qualified leads, wherever they are in the funnel. It consists of three tools – ProspectorIQ, VisitorIQ, and PeopleIQ – to help you find and add leads that fit your ideal customer profile from your CRM platform.
Another thing that sets Nutshell apart is that their team provides industry-leading digital marketing services from an award-winning agency.
Need a user-friendly CRM to boost sales and team efficiency?
Take our guided tour to explore Nutshell’s incredible features!
Price: Starting at$10 per seat per month, free plan available
Free trial: 14-day free trial available
Support: Support via an online form and email
Mobile app: Yes
Monday.com is second on our list of the best CRMs for small businesses in 2024. One of Monday.com’s standout features is its sales cycle customizations.
You can use this CRM platform to customize your sales cycle in a way that works best for you and your team. For example, you can edit deal stages, manage multiple pipelines at once in a single dashboard, and add as many columns and rows as you need.
So, if you’re searching for a CRM system that can help you streamline your sales cycle and processes, Monday.com could be a great choice.
3. Zendesk
Price: Starting at $19 per user per month
Free trial: 14-day free trial available
Support: Support via ahelp suite with articles and guides and online community center
Mobile app: Yes
Zendesk is a great CRM software option for small businesses that want to deliver better customer support and service.
With Zendesk, you can track each and every lead throughout their entire buying journey, so you can easily see all the interactions they’ve had with your brand along the way.
You can also use Zendesk to store customer information that you can access in a pinch, so your team can stay up to date with customer support tickets, questions, and conversations.
Deliver personalized customer service at every stage of your sales pipeline with Zendesk.
4. Zoho
Price: Starting at $14 per user per month, free plan available
Free trial: 15-day free trial available
Support: Support via email Monday through Friday
Mobile app: Yes
Zoho is fourth on our list of the best CRM software for small businesses. A cloud-based platform, Zoho CRM provides small businesses with robust sales solutions.
This CRM lets you connect with leads through different platforms through one interface. You can use Zoho CRM to automate repetitive sales tasks, access detailed sales reports, manage your sales pipeline, and more.
This CRM platform also integrates nicely with other Zoho tools, like their sales, marketing, and project management suites.
5. Pipedrive
Price: Starting at $12.50 per user per month
Free trial: 14-day free trial available
Support: Support via live chat and email 24/7
Mobile app: Yes
Pipedrive ranks fifth on our list of the best small business CRMs. If your team needs a simple CRM with essential features without fuss, Pipedrive could be your optimal choice.
With a clean, hassle-free interface, you can use Pipedrive to manage all your leads, contacts, and deals.
Pipedrive also enables you to create custom stages of your sales pipeline so you and your team can manage your deals in a way that works best for you.
So, if you need an easy CRM for small businesses that simplifies navigation and use for your team, Pipedrive is for you.
6. Salesforce
Price: Starting at $25+ per user per month
Free trial: 30-day free trial available
Support: Live chat and 24/7 phone and email support
Mobile app: Yes
Salesforce is one of the best CRMs for small businesses, and for good reason. It’s optimized to help businesses of all sizes, from large enterprises to small, local companies. The great thing about this is that it offers specialized pricing for smaller business plans.
One of Salesforce’s greatest strengths is how intuitive and customizable it is. Navigating the Salesforce dashboard is incredibly easy, and you can customize your dashboard setup. You can also generate custom reports to help with your analytics.
As a bonus, Salesforce integrates with other tools like Slack to help you effortlessly sync information and schedule tasks.
7. HubSpot
Price: Starting at $30 per month with a free version available
Free trial: 14-day free trial available
Support: Live chat and 24/7 email support
Mobile app: Yes
HubSpot is very similar to Salesforce in the sense that it’s one of the best-known tools out there. Also, like Salesforce, it’s built to help both large companies and smaller businesses like yours.
Unlike Salesforce, however, HubSpot offers a free plan. As you might expect, this plan doesn’t have nearly as many features as the paid plans. That said, it still includes all the essential elements of a CRM. If you’re looking for a more lightweight tool—at least to start with—HubSpot might be the one for you.
HubSpot doesn’t offer as much customization as Salesforce, but it still features an easy-to-use dashboard that makes navigating this tool a breeze.
8. Insightly
Price: Starting at $29 per month with a free version available
Free trial: 14-day free trial available
Support: Live chat and 24/7 phone support
Mobile app: Yes
Insightly is one of the best SMB CRMs out there for a few reasons. Firstly, it offers a free plan like HubSpot does, although that plan lacks many of the best features of the paid version (like the data backup system).
This CRM is very process-oriented—it lets you assign specific tasks to specific team members using to-do lists. Insightly also incorporates business intelligence (BI) capabilities to help you see trends across your data and make more informed decisions for your marketing.
9. Streak
Price: Starting at $49 per month with a free version available
Free trial: 14-day free trial available
Support: 24/7 live chat and email support
Mobile app: Yes
Another of the top CRMs for small businesses is Streak. Streak is most notable for its integration with Gmail and Google Workspace. It’s so well-integrated that you don’t even have to pull up a separate platform to use it—it’s embedded directly into Gmail, so you can simply access it from there.
Streak performs all the usual CRM functions—tracking data on leads and customers and storing that data for you—but it also heavily emphasizes email marketing, hence its integration with Gmail.
Finally, Streak is yet another top SMB CRM that offers a free plan in addition to its paid ones.
10. Freshsales
Price: Starting at $15 per month with a free plan available
Free trial: 21-day free trial available
Support: Phone and email support during business hours
Mobile app: Yes
Freshsales is a CRM offered by Freshworks, which provides various digital marketing solutions. Freshsales is another tool on this list that conveniently offers a free plan and a paid option. It also provides a 21-day free trial if you want to try it out.
Freshsales is available on both desktop and mobile and provides an incredibly user-friendly interface on both types of devices. It also features an AI assistant to help you automate tasks and quickly obtain data from your audience.
Freshsales integrates with various email platforms, and it lets you set up customized forms on your website to help you capture data from leads who visit your site.
11. SugarCRM
Price: Starting at $49 per month
Free trial: 7-day free trial available
Support: Email support during business hours
Mobile app: Yes
The SugarCRM tool lets you create customized dashboards to see how you meet your short- and long-term goals. It also gives you an overview of your customer journey so that you can determine sales opportunities.
Its core features include:
Campaign management
Lead management
Project management
Reporting and analytics
Email and calendar integration
12. Agile CRM
Price: Starting at $8.99 per month with a free version available
Free trial: No, but a free version for up to ten users is available
Support: Email and phone support
Mobile app: Yes
Agile CRM boasts an all-in-one CRM software platform, ideal for small businesses who want access to sales, marketing, and engagement tools without spending too much on software tools.
This cloud-based CRM includes features for sales enablement, marketing automation, and customer service for consistent messaging across teams.
13. Keap
Price: Starting at $249 per month
Free trial: 14-day free trial available
Support: Phone and chat support
Mobile app: Yes
Keap is a sales and automation solution built for small businesses and solo entrepreneurs. Its automation features are especially helpful for small teams for handling repetitive tasks as they focus on building customer relationships.
14. Copper
Price: Starting at $9 per seat per month
Free trial: 14-day free trial available
Support: Live chat support
Mobile app: Yes
Copper CRM may be an ideal CRM solution for small businesses who exclusively use Google Workspace in their daily operations.
Copper is specifically designed to be used with Google products, such as Gmail and Google Docs, and while this is good news for companies that already rely on these apps, teams that prefer a more dynamic range of software integrations may feel tied down.
End your search for the best CRMs for small businesses with Nutshell
Start and end your search for the best small business CRM software with Nutshell. We designed Nutshell to give small businesses like yours the tools and support you need to generate leads and convert those leads into happy customers or clients.
With a range of easy-to-use features and a dedicated support team to help you maximize your sales every step of the way, Nutshell is a number one choice for small businesses that want to grow. Don’t just take our word for it, though. See how Nutshell can drive revenue for your company by starting your free trial!
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