Best CRM Software

We’ve all suffered from the customer-side perspective, stepping from sales rep to sales rep and holding our breath through redundant questions, which makes for a very bad first impression with a prospective client.

Thankfully, you can use specialized software for that, which is known as customer relationship management software or CRM.

According to Buyer Zone (now acquired by Business.com), 91% of businesses with over 11 employees now use CRM as their client-relations tool.

The best customer relationship management software (CRM software) lets you deliver better service and provides helpful insight about your clients’ needs.

In fact, 74% of the users say that CRM software has significantly improved their access to customer data.

But there are a lot of CRM solutions to choose from, and not all of them are great. Each has its strengths and weaknesses in its respective fields.

So, which one should you choose?

To simplify things, we have reviewed the very best CRM software out there and listed the top CRM solutions for your convenience.

6 Best CRM Software

Here are the 6 top customer relationship management software right now that are worth checking out for a better client experience:

• Freshsales: Best CRM for sales teams
  
  
• Salesflare: Best for small and medium sized B2B businesses
  
  
• Pipedrive: Best CRM for salespeople
  
  
• HubSpot CRM: Best free CRM Software for growing teams
  
  
• Keap: Best for Entrepreneurs and serious business owners
  
  
• Creatio CRM: Best enterprise-grade CRM solution

About Freshsales

Freshsales is a cloud-based CRM solution designed to help businesses in managing leads, customer engagement, and client relationships through a unified portal. It empowers sales teams with more time for selling by automating the sales process and increases efficiency and productivity in their daily activities.

It provides a centralized platform for your sales and marketing teams by offering sales force automation, marketing automation, chat and telephony, all in one roof. If you are looking for a tool that can help your marketing teams in organizing customer information, personalizing email campaigns, and find the right sales opportunities, then Freshsales is an ideal fit for your needs.

With top-brand clients such as Dyson and PharmEasy, FreshSales is an award-winning CRM software catering their services across a multitude of industries like Real Estate, Retail, Healthcare and many more. Which makes it one of the best CRM software out there.

Freshsales Benefits

Close deals faster

With Freshsales, you get a complete view of your customer’s interactions which can help deliver personalized experiences. You can also leverage this valuable data to drive revenue, develop long-lasting relationships with customers, and enable sales & support teams to work together in helping customers seamlessly.

Improve seller effectiveness

Freshsales allows you to improve seller effectiveness by streamlining your sales process and making your workflow smoother. You can have conversations with context, automate time-consuming tasks, and spend your valuable time on selling and not on mundane legwork.

Reduce IT complexity & cost

Freshsales helps you in reducing IT complexity and cost with a comprehensive client solution. With it, you can increase adoption, reduce costs, and boost morale. Keep teams happy with a solution that is easy to implement as well as easier to use.

Freshsales Features

• AB Testing
• Activity Dashboard
• Alerts/Notifications
• Audience Targeting
• Calendar Management
• Calendar/Reminder System
• Call List Management
• Call Recording
• Campaign Management
• Case Notes
• Cataloging/Categorization
• Conflict Management

Freshsales Pros & Cons

Freshsales Pricing

Freshsales offers 4 different subscription plans according to the various business requirements:

• Free: free of cost plan for Getting sales teams organized and engaging leads faster
• Growth: $15 /month, billed annually for powerful CRM automation to help growing teams 
• Pro:  $39 per month charged yearly for managing multiple teams and growing revenue
• Enterprise: $69 for every month billed yearly, for advanced customization and control

Technical Details

About Salesflare

Salesflare is an intelligent CRM solution that small B2B businesses love to use. It is designed as a zero-input sales pipeline tool that thinks and works for the user, and not the other way around. It is simple, yet powerful. It’s also easy to use, and keeps track of your customer data automatically, so you can focus on closing deals and your clients.

It sends automated email sequences, so you can reach out to your leads at scale with a more personal touch. It automatically fills out your address book and keeps track of all interactions with the leads you’re in contact with, so you can make sure your clients get a premium experience.

Used by thousands of businesses, Salesflare is an award-winning CRM solution for small & medium sized B2B companies. It is definitely worth checking out if you are looking for one of the best CRM software for small businesses in india.

Salesflare Benefits

Do less robot work with Automation

Salesflare allows you to fully automate your contact and company info and stop manual entry of contact and company data. Your timelines are synced with your email, calendar meetings, phone call history and your customers’ social media profiles, so you can simplify your workflow and do less mundane work.

Power up your Integration game

With Email sidebars for Gmail & Outlook, Salesflare allows you work seamlessly without leaving your email inbox. Powered by REST API, its API can be connected to any other app and make your workflow smoother. Not only that, Salesflare offers native integrations and access to 1,000+ app integrations through Zapier, PieSync and Blendr.

Communicate with your customers effortlessly

With Email and web tracking, you can get the full picture of how leads and customers are interacting with your company. Salesflare also allows you to see who your colleagues already know – and who they know best.

Salesflare Features

• Auto-Responders
• Business Card/Badge Scanning
• Calendar/Reminder System
• Call List Management
• Campaign Management
• Campaign Personalization
• CAN SPAM Compliance
• Cataloging/Categorization
• Collaboration Tools
• Contact Management
• Content Delivery
• Content Management

Salesflare Pros & Cons

Salesflare Pricing

Salesflare offers 3 different subscription plans for different business needs:

• Growth: $29 per month for growing businesses needing core CRM features.
• Pro:  $49/month for additional CRM needs of an aspiring business.
• Enterprise: $99 monthly for professional CRM support and advanced features

Technical Details

About Pipedrive

Pipedrive is a CRM and sales pipeline tool designed for small to medium sized sales teams. It was built collectively by experienced salespeople and ex-Skypers. Pipedrive specializes in organizing leads in such a way that you’ll always have a great overview of overall sales, and makes you focus on the important deals first.

Pipedrive gives you clarity, and gets your team on the same page by tracking your emails, calls, and progress automatically. It clears the way, so you can focus on doing what you do best. It also allows your team to spend less time filling details and more time on selling with the help of a CRM tool that is both agile and powerful.

With more than 95 thousand customers worldwide across 179 countries, Pipedrive is definitely one of the best CRM software out there.

Pipedrive Benefits

Visual sales pipeline

Pipedrive allows you to see your entire sales pipeline at a glance. You can easily update deals by dragging and dropping them into place.

Customizable pipeline

With Pipedrive, you can set-up your pipeline to match your sales cycle. To top it all off, you can also add custom stages and fields, really sprucing up your workspace.

Team collaboration

Pipedrive allows you to easily collaborate on deals and activities with your fellow colleagues. You can also share regular updates on sales activities and wins.

Robust Integrations

With the support of over 280 integrations, Pipedrive offers you to expand the capabilities of your business with the seamless hundreds of apps and integrations.

Activity reminders

Pipedrive allows for easy scheduling of reminders for all your sales activities. So, you can stay on top of all your deals and never miss a follow up.

Pipedrive Features

• Activity Dashboard
• Alerts/Notifications
• Business Card/Badge Scanning
• Calendar Management
• Calendar/Reminder System
• Call List Management
• Call Recording
• Campaign Management
• Cataloging/Categorization
• Churn Management
• Client/Property Matching
• Code-free Development

Pipedrive Pros & Cons

Pipedrive Pricing

Pipedrive offers 4 different subscription plans:

• Essential: $12.50 per month for getting organized and jump-starting your business
• Advanced: $24.90/month for boosting your team’s efficiency with effortless automation
• Professional: $49.9 monthly for optimizing your established business’s performance
• Enterprise: $99 each month for ensuring seamless multi-team collaboration with unlimited customization and support

Technical Details

About HubSpot CRM

HubSpot CRM has been designed from the ground up and is ready to eliminate manual work and actually help sales teams. It was built ready for the modern world to help users get running and start selling. HubSpot CRM takes care of all the little details – logging emails, recording calls, and managing data – in a very intuitive manner therefore freeing up valuable selling time in the process.

Whether you’ve got a small team of five or a sophisticated sales force of 500, HubSpot is surely one of the best free CRM software in india.

HubSpot CRM Benefits

Get real-time visibility into your sales pipeline

With HubSpot CRM, you get an up-to-the-minute view of your entire sales pipeline on a clean and visual dashboard.

Huge Number of App Integrations

Extend the power and flexibility of HubSpot’s CRM platform by seamlessly connecting your favorite tools and apps in just a few clicks.

HubSpot CRM Features

• Activity Dashboard
• Alerts/Notifications
• Calendar/Reminder System
• Campaign Management
• Document Management
• Document Storage
• Email Management

HubSpot CRM Pros & Cons

HubSpot CRM Pricing

HubSpot CRM offers 3 different subscription plans:

• Starter: $45/month for core CRM requirements of an aspiring business
• Professional: $800 per month for additional CRM support and features 
• Enterprise:  $3,200 monthly for advanced features and CRM needs of a growing business

Technical Details

About Keap

Keap is an all-in-one sales & marketing CRM software solution designed for serious business owners. It organizes your customer information and daily work under one roof, freeing you up from boring tasks so you have more time to focus more on growing your business.

Keap lets you organize everything in one tool, automatically follow up, and deliver the service that wins more business. It also offers marketing automation, repeatable sales processes and marketing campaigns that will keep your business moving forward.

For 20 years, over 200,000 entrepreneurs have trusted Keap to conquer their business chaos, and 89% of them agree that Keap helps them in running their business more efficiently.

Also, 84% of these customers saw an increase in their clients using Keap, which definitely makes it one of the best CRM software out there.

Keap Benefits

Capture and convert leads more efficiently

Keap allows you to capture leads effectively, and organize them in one place. You can segment your contacts and send targeted campaigns seamlessly. With it, leads move more efficiently through your sales funnel.

Follow-up and get paid faster

Keap offers pre-made templates, so you can quickly set up follow-up automations, including reminders to approve and pay invoices. Collect payments with native WePay, Stripe, and PayPal integrations easily.

Consolidate your tools into one place

With Keap, you have one place for your lead capture, customer information, email and SMS campaigns, calendar booking, invoicing and payments, and much more.

Hassle-free migration

Switching to a new platform can be scary, that is why Keap offers custom and free migration from these platforms: ActiveCampaign, AWeber, ConstantContact, HubSpot, MailChimp, and Ontraport.

Keap Features

• AB Testing
• Activity Dashboard
• Analytics/ROI Tracking
• Calendar Management
• Calendar/Reminder System
• Campaign Management
• CAN SPAM Compliance
• Client Management
• Contact Database
• Contact Management
• Customer Database

Keap Pros & Cons

Keap Pricing

Keap offers 3 subscription plans for the various needs and requirements of a business:

• Lite: $79/month for the core CRM requirements of new businesses.
• Pro: $169 per month for growing companies and their additional CRM needs.
• Max: $199 each month for established businesses and their teams requiring extra support.

Technical Details

About Creatio CRM

Creatio CRM is a full-fledged CRM software designed for professional marketing, sales and servicing teams. It provides clients with comprehensive and full-grown applications to accelerate marketing, sales, and service that can be deployed as standalone products, or as a bundle on a single platform.

The various products include:

1. Marketing Creatio: multichannel marketing platform to orchestrate customer journeys and accelerate lead-to-revenue.
   
2. Sales Creatio: a sales automation software to accelerate the complete sales cycle — from lead to repeat sales.
   
3. Service Creatio: an intelligent service management platform to streamline customer engagements and accelerate service delivery.

With thousands of organizations—such as Hersheys and Oman Arab Bank—employing Creatio products to deliver amazing customer experience, it is surely one of the best CRM software solutions in india.

Creatio CRM Benefits

Out-of-the-box processes

Creatio applications include out-of-the-box processes that guide users through the most effective actions and make it easy to jump-start using the system.

Engaging interface that users love

Creatio products have an engaging user interface with a social look and feel, which makes working with the application easy and intuitive.

Complete view of the customer journey

Creatio also delivers end-to-end processes to manage your overall customer journey. It connects the dots between marketing, sales and customer service efficiently and allows companies to effectively manage every step of the customers’ interactions.

Manage marketing campaigns across multiple channels

With Creatio, you can take advantage of a holistic multichannel marketing software powered by out-of-the-box best practices to boost your demand generation. Reach your audience with the most relevant message at the right time on the right channel.

Creatio CRM Features

• Analytics/ROI Tracking
• Calendar/Reminder System
• Call Management
• Channel Management
• Contract/License Management
• Document Storage
• Email Marketing
• Field Sales Management
• Internal Chat Integration
• Lead Capture
• Lead Distribution

Creatio CRM Pros & Cons

Creatio CRM Pricing

CRM Creatio offers a number of different plans and pricing, allowing you to select the edition that best fits your business model.

Technical Details

What is CRM Software?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is defined as software that helps businesses build strong customer relationships and improve sales as well as customer experience.

Features of CRM Software

The top CRM software offers these 3 core features:

• Contact management
• Interaction tracking
• Lead management

Contact management

It stores important contact information such as addresses, names and social media accounts in a searchable database.

Interaction tracking

It adds notes and tracks interaction history to document conversations with specific contacts.

Lead management

It manages the process of converting prospects into potential customers (leads) by identifying, scoring, and moving leads through the sales pipeline.

Benefits of CRM Software

• Organization of Information
• Personalized Communication
• Increased Retention

Organization of Information

One of the biggest benefits of CRM is an effective organization of information. You can follow and track basic information as well as advanced data about every single customer. It provides a centralized system to store and manage all information, making things easier for everyone.

Personalized Communication

Your customers can benefit from the personalization features many CRM solutions offer — which is a huge advantage when 86% of consumers say that personalization played a role in their purchasing decision, according to a study by Infosys. All of that data in your CRM database can be used to build deeper customer relationships through personalized communications.

Increased Retention

CRM exposes who your highest revenue-generating or most engaged clients are. You may be able to identify a group of customers who attend webinars or open all of their emails through a CRM. Why not reach out to them to advocate on your brand’s behalf? A CRM also increases retention among your existing clients.

Types of CRM software

Knowing about the various kinds of CRM solutions can help you select a platform which offers the features you are searching for. Some types of CRM software include:

• Operational CRM software
• Analytical CRM software
• Collaborative CRM software

Operational CRM software

This kind of CRM solution is heavily tailored for automating sales and marketing functions, such as lead management and campaign management, to improve operational efficiency. Key features of operational CRM software include contact management, lead scoring, and sales and marketing automation.

Analytical CRM software

Analytical CRM software empowers you in analyzing customer and sales data. These CRM tools focus heavily on reporting analytics and provide details of metrics such as the average deal cycle, recurring revenue, top sales accounts, and customer retention rates. Data mining and sales forecasting are the prominent features of analytical CRM tools.

Collaborative CRM software

A collaborative CRM tool focuses heavily on the ability to allocate important customer information between teams. It primarily helps improve customer service, retention, and satisfaction. Interaction management, relationship management, and document management are some of its main features.

Who Uses CRM Software?

Contrary to popular opinion, CRM can be used across various departments of your organization such as Sales, Marketing, Accounting, and HR.

• Human Resources
• Accounting
• Marketing
• Sales

Human Resources

CRM technology has a natural crossover into HR, everything from new employee recruitment to managing existing employee files.

Accounting

Several CRM platforms offer direct integration with your Accounting and billing process. Rather than receptively entering account information and contact details your CRM and accounting software will communicate with each other and do the data entry for you.

Marketing

The marketing opportunities for CRM are seemingly endless, as highlighted all over our website. Marketing departments rely heavily on various types of in-house CRM systems as well as special 3rd party products for specific functions, like email marketing or SEO.

Sales

Naturally your sales team is going to be the biggest user of a CRM system. It is their responsibility to convert leads into customers and customers into promoters of your brand.

How to Find the Best CRM software For Your Business?

With so many options to choose from, finding the best CRM software for your business can feel like finding a needle in a haystack.

Which factors should you look into and which features should you ignore? Well, here are some of the aspects worth considering when searching for the ideal CRM software for your business:

• Business Size
• Core & Additional CRM Features
• Third-Party Integrations

Business Size

The size of your business plays a vital role in determining your ideal CRM software. If you have separate departments for marketing, sales, IT, and customer service, you need more advanced functions than a humble firm with 6 employees.

Your business size also defines how much the software is actually going to cost. The more user seats you require, the more expensive the software.

Core & Additional CRM Features

Most CRMs have a standard set of features. Your CRM should be including them as well. These features include:

• Contact and lead management
• Document sharing and storage
• Workflow automation
• Interaction tracking
• Mobile access

You should also check out the various additional features being offered by these solutions. Do they seem useful according to your business model?

If the answer is positive, then you should definitely consider them before finalizing your choices.

Third-Party Integrations

To really streamline and automate your business workflow, your CRM solution needs to play well with the tools you’re already using in your business.

You should make sure your CRM integrates with the most-used applications in your organization, such as:

• Email platforms
• Social media tools
• Customer service tools
• Calling/video chat software
• Analytics tools
• Calendar

What Does CRM Software Cost?

A variety of factors come into play in both the upfront and occurring costs of a CRM. For upfront costs, a business will pay for setup, any custom integrations, and training. The ongoing cost is the subscription cost to actually use the CRM. CRMs are usually run on a subscription model which means users will pay a monthly or yearly rate to use the CRM. The subscription models for CRMs are generally set up as either a per-user or a per-contact model.

• Per-user model
• Per-contact model

Per-user model

The average price of a subscription CRM broadly ranges anywhere from $30 to $80. While there are more premium or bare-bones CRMs that are either cheaper or more expensive than this, this will generally be the average price.

Per-contact model

Some CRMs are based on a per contact structure. These are often CRM all in ones that also include marketing tools. These are not on a per-user basis and instead, businesses are paying on the number of contacts they want to have in the CRM. This may be more cost effective depending on the number of people in the company.

Conclusion

Having the right CRM solution can make a huge impact on your business, as it helps in staying organized and keeping your clients satisfied.

To do a quick recap, we reviewed the top CRM software as well as their features, benefits and respective pros and cons. Here are the best CRM solutions according to their respective business types:

• Freshsales: Best CRM for sales teams
• Salesflare: Best for small and medium sized B2B businesses
• Pipedrive: Best CRM for salespeople
• HubSpot: CRM: Best free CRM Software for growing teams
• Keap: Best- for Entrepreneurs and serious business owners
• Creatio CRM: Best enterprise-grade CRM solution

Hopefully, your task of finding the right CRM software has become easier after reading this article.