5 of the Best CRM Tools for Your Business
Implementing a CRM tool that fits perfectly in your business framework is challenging. CRM software helps you manage customer interactions and becomes a central node for other departments to collaborate with sales. Therefore, it’s imperative to ensure that the CRM tool of your choice satisfies all these criteria.
In this section, we will look at five top CRM software that you can evaluate and adopt.
Note: Since most of the following tools offer the basic features such as email, calls, SMS, social CRM, reports, etc., we are focusing on the other tools here.
1. HubSpot CRM
HubSpot’s free CRM is a top-notch system for startups or anyone looking to get acquainted with CRM tools.
HubSpot CRM helps you manage your sales pipeline, create automated email sequences for your leads, communicate with your prospects via live chat or emails, and track customer interactions across email, social media, or calls. Hubspot includes a template marketplace and a large number of integrations.
HubSpot CRM is free for contacts up to 1,000,000. As your company grows, you can upgrade to other marketing, sales, and customer service packages, or you can integrate other third-party products with the tool.
2. Zoho CRM
Zoho CRM is one of the products from Zoho’s exhaustive business suite. Zoho CRM offers features that are suitable for both SMBs and large-scale organizations. The CRM application comes with sales automation, pipeline management, marketing automation, and process management features. You can connect with your leads across different platforms through a single interface.
Zia – Zoho’s AI bot helps businesses with identifying trends, predicting sales, and data enrichment activities.
Companies can get started with Zoho CRM for as low as $18/month and upgrade as they move along.
3. Freshsales
Freshsales is a sales CRM by Freshdesk. Features such as event tracking, phone, emails, workflows, etc. enable you to track your leads and deals across their purchase journey.
Like HubSpot and Zoho CRM, Freshsales offers mobile CRM and a range of products for business, making it easy to build a comprehensive MarTech stack.
Freshsales is perfect for SMBs and mid-market enterprises, and you can get started with the tool for $18/month.
4. Salesforce Sales Cloud
Salesforce Sales Cloud is a CRM tool offered by Salesforce. The CRM tool covers the entire purchase journey and includes features such as account and contact management, opportunity management, lead management, intuitive workflows, file sharing, and sales forecasting.
Business owners and salespeople can manage their sales activities on the go through mobile CRM.
Beginners can opt for the Salesforce Essential plan at $25/user/month (paid annually). Users can avail add-ons such as Sales Cloud Einstein (Salesforce’s AI tool) and Pardot (Salesforce’s marketing automation platform) at an additional subscription fee.
5. Mailchimp
Mailchimp is primarily a MAP that also offers specific CRM capabilities. Mailchimp is perfect for freelancers, startups, and SMBs as it provides the ideal blend of features that are useful for both sales and marketing departments.
Mailchimp has a free plan for a list size up to 2000 contacts with bare essential CRM features and paid plans starting $9.99/month.
Mailchimp is widely used among startups and SMBs because of its capability to integrate with other enterprise CRMs such as Salesforce.
Creating a CRM Strategy in 5 Steps
Having a CRM strategy in place ensures smooth operations of your CRM efforts. Here is a 5-step framework to create a successful CRM strategy for your organization.
Step 1: Know Your Business Goals
It is essential to decide on your goals to optimally use the CRM application as a business enabler. Knowing business objectives will make it easy for you to craft a CRM strategy. For instance, if your business objective is to boost annual revenue by 10% through new customer acquisition and by 25% through customer retention, you can plan the activities to be executed to reach the objectives.
When you map these activities with sales objectives, you can identify how CRM can facilitate achieving the goals.
Step 2: Involve Your Employees
There are two aspects to this step.
First, you need to communicate with your employees on how the CRM implementation is going to benefit them and actively involve them right from the beginning. This is particularly helpful as people working on the grassroots level can immensely help in the tactical area.
Second, as CRM is not restricted exclusively to the sales department, you need to promote interdepartmental collaboration between the customer-facing departments and break down the proverbial silos.
Step 3: Revisit the Buyer’s Journey
Start by evaluating the customer data stored in your current systems. This step will give you an understanding of what data you’re collecting and the additional data points you need to gather through the CRM.
Revisit the buyer’s journey to visualize how a lead converts into a customer. Each stage of the buyer’s journey should be connected to its equivalent stage in the sales pipeline. Knowing this will help you to understand the activities that lead to deal closure.
Step 4: Pick the Right CRM
Understand the features you need in a CRM software and gain clarity on choosing the right CRM tools. Ideally, try the five CRM tools mentioned in this article to find the right fit. Simultaneously, identify their top competitors and pilot test the ones that suit your requirements.
Remember, don’t rush into buying a solution just yet. Use the trial period of each CRM provider to evaluate them thoroughly, and finalize a tool based on the features compatible with your existing ecosystem, one that suits your requirements, is easy to use, and has integration capabilities.
Step 5: Keep Improving Your CRM Practices
It’s unlikely that you’ll hit the sweet spot in the first go, especially when it comes to implementing a CRM or a MAP. You might run into challenges initially but keep tweaking the process until everything is streamlined. You can also reduce the trial and error step by hiring a CRM consultant from the initial stages of implementation.
5 Benefits of a CRM
Here are the five benefits of implementing CRM software at your organization.
1. De-silos Customer Facing Departments
An organization can be customer-centric when its customer-facing departments work together. As you can integrate your MAP and customer support software with CRM, it promotes interdepartmental collaboration and allows organizations to serve their customers better.
2. Improves Communication with Customers
As you track each lead through the different stages of the sales pipeline, you can deliver the right message at the right time.
3. Brings Efficiency Through Automation
From the time a lead fills in a form to following up with them, everything is automated. Also, since the data is fetched automatically from multiple sources, there’s no need to invest time manually entering data. Salespeople can focus on what matters the most — closing more deals.
4. Helps Make Data-driven Decisions
As all customer data is centralized in one place along with sales analytics, the sales team can accurately identify their prospects’ needs and understand what is working and what’s not. Armed with this knowledge, sales teams can make decisions backed by actionable data.
5. Boosts Revenue
A 360-degree view of customers enables organizations to understand their requirements. Using this information, organizations can introduce upselling, cross-selling, and customer retention programs.
How to Choose a CRM for Your Organization?
Now that you know the essentials of CRM software, let’s look at how to go about selecting a CRM system for your business. The CRM market has products for different categories, ranging right from freelancers or solopreneurs to large corporations.
In this section, we will guide you with specific pointers that will allow you to choose a CRM that works perfectly for your organization.
1. Who Will Use the CRM System?
In a solo venture, there will be only one person using the CRM system, whereas, in a startup, people from sales and marketing departments might use the CRM. At a large corporation, the CRM might be used exclusively by salespeople, while marketers use a MAP.
You will be able to identify what you need in a CRM by understanding who will use it and benefit from it.
2. What Are the Current Sales Use Cases?
What is your current sales strategy and/or process? Knowing how you approach your potential customers and how they find you will help you enlist the activities you perform to bring new customers on board. Another way to do this is to identify the various sales and marketing channels you are using to reach out to your target audience.
After taking stock of these two aspects, you’ll have some clarity on the sales activities and their corresponding features to look for in the CRM.
3. What Are the Integration Capabilities of the CRM?
You will need to check whether the CRM system you’ve selected offers integrations for the existing tools in your martech stack. This is particularly crucial as you’d be connecting with the same customer across multiple touchpoints.
If it doesn’t offer integration with a particular tool, then either see if the CRM provides a similar feature or look for alternatives.
A simple way to avoid integration difficulties is to check brands that offer multiple products under the same umbrella. For example, HubSpot, Zoho, Freshworks, etc. provide numerous products under their brand name. So, you can choose the tools that you need and integrate more products as your company grows.
4. What Is the Cost?
CRM has multifaceted utility, so the costs of CRM systems might seem to be off the charts when you see them in the absolute sense. Therefore, consider the cost aspect after you’ve answered the above three questions so that you can see the payoff to the investment you’re making.
Of course, CRM incurs not just monetary investment but also of the time and all the changes you must make in the existing environment.
Tip: Start with the free plan to gauge its compatibility. If the free plan doesn’t cater to your requirements, opt for the trial period offered by most of the cloud-based CRMs.
Who Needs CRM Software?
A CRM software is adopted across B2B and B2C organizations of different sizes, serving different sectors and industries. Here is how a CRM solution helps three types of organizations:
1. SMBs
Small and medium-scale businesses’ sales departments have precise requirements and may not need audacious features. CRMs for SMBs are aware of this and hence offer features that let SMBs automate repetitive tasks so that stakeholders can focus on increasing revenue.
2. Startups
Startups are chaotic in their rapid growth stage. CRMs tame this chaos, bring order to sales and marketing departments, and offer intuitive integration and reporting features. This allows startups to measure their progress without having them spend too much time on learning the tool.
3. Enterprises
Enterprises always look to go big, and they require a robust number cruncher with cross-functional collaboration capabilities minus any complexities. Analytical and collaborative CRMs help enterprises achieve just that.
Who Uses CRM Software?
Marketers, salespeople, and customer service professionals require different utilities of a CRM system. Let’s look at how CRM is useful to each one of them:
1. Marketers
Marketers collect customer data from multiple sources, such as lead generation forms, surveys, social media, etc. By integrating the CRM system with a MAP, marketers can supercharge marketing efforts through drip marketing campaigns, social media ad campaigns, and so on.
2. Salespeople
Salespeople are always on their toes needing to communicate with every prospect and customer on a 1-on-1 basis. A CRM tool provides a central repository where they can get to know their customers at a greater depth, profile them as hot/warm/cold leads, and create real-time sales reports that give them a quick overview of the sales performance.
3. Customer Service Professionals
By integrating the customer support application with the CRM, you get a composite view of your customers and enables customer service executives proactively solve customer queries. The use of social CRM allows them to communicate with customers via social media, calls, text, chat, etc.
Next Steps
To gain a deeper understanding of CRM as a strategy, a process, or technology, we would recommend that you read some more about CRM technology. We’ve created a CRM Buyer’s Guide to introduce you to the different CRM solutions present in the market today and the features they offer.
If you have any questions about CRM technology, ask us on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter.