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The 7 Best CRM Software (2023 Rankings)
With the best CRM software, your business will be able to manage its customer relationships in the most effective way possible. Your team will be able to work together more efficiently, and you’ll be able to make sure that your customers and prospects are always happy.
The best CRM software can help your business in many ways.
It can automate tasks, keep track of customer interactions, and help you close more sales.
It can also make it easier to upsell and cross-sell to your customers.
In short, good CRM software can help your business run more smoothly and efficiently.
CRM software isn’t just a tool for storing customer information. It’s an important asset for centralizing customer relationship management, lead generation, automation, and marketing campaigns.
Hundreds of CRM software tools exist today. But in this article, we will review the ones that are a cut above the rest. We will tell you about their features, price points, customer support, and performance.
I encourage you to read to the very end to find the best tool for you. I also recommend trying out a few of the tools to see how they suit your needs.
Let’s get started…
Table of Contents
What Is The Best CRM Software?
HubSpot started off as a CRM but today, it offers a robust collection of marketing, sales, and service features. It is a great productivity and performance tracking tool that’s worth considering if you want a tool you can scale with.
As a sales or marketing professional, you can save time with HubSpot, capture and nurtures leads, and grow your database.
HubSpot CRM is free, which is quite generous considering most CRM tools with a free offering limit their software to only the most basic functions.
Although you have to pay to access HubSpot marketing tools, the subscription is quite budget friendly compared to other tools.
Here’s what you can do with HubSpot:
- Send personalized lead nurturing emails for free
- Use HubSpot’s analytics reports to track results
- Sync your email to HubSpot CRM and organize and manage your contacts from the same place
- Integrate with your most important tools and handle everything from HubSpot
- Use chatbots and live chat to assist your customers
- View performance for your entire sales pipeline
- If you run ads on Google or social media, you can track and monitor them through the ad management tool.
- Advanced features such as content strategies, phone support, predictive lead scoring, revenue attribution, advanced segmentation, etcetera on the paid plans.
HubSpot is easy to use. It lets you view and update your sales pipeline with ease. Emails are easy to personalize through an email builder, and its form builder makes it easy to build great lead capture forms.
Salesforce targets a wide audience with its offering but in my opinion, it is best suited for enterprises.
It is a sales CRM, social media management, and territory sales management software. Its robustness makes it ideal for handling all lead and customer related operations in large organizations. From customer service to marketing, sales, and analytics, you can handle your entire organization within SalesForce.
Salesforce is cloud based; if you want an on-premise CRM tool, SalesForce is not for you.
Here are some things you can do with SalesForce:
- Use the opportunity management feature to identify perfect leads and close them
- Contact management. Track and leverage customer history to make important business decisions
- Manage sales goals and performance
- File tracking and sharing
- Customize your feed to see the most important information for your business
- 24/7 Customer support via email, tickets and phone. Chat support is not available.
- 30 day free trial
- Cloud-hosting makes this service fast and cost friendly
- Compatibility across all major OS, including Android
- Lead generation, management and Einstein lead scoring
- Mass emailing with lots of email templates
- Open API allows high customization
- Third party integrations
Salesforce offers a great user experience through its visual dashboard, a user friendly interface, clean and easy to navigate layout, sophisticated automation and personalization, and device-friendly options that keep you connected on the move.
Plans range from $25/user/month to $1250/user/month. You can also contact SalesForce if you require a customized plan.
Monday.com is a great tool for building CRM workflows based on custom specifications. You can create specific workflows to track all parts of the sales cycle, from the top of the funnel to after-sales.
Monday’s pricing ranges from a free offering to $16/seat/month for their top plan, making it a great option for those who want to test a robust tool without breaking the bank.
Monday.com integrates with other tools and also has an app that allows you to keep up with all your important performance information while on the go.
Monday has a clean, easy to navigate and simple to use interface. Information is displayed in organized graphs, charts and tables. If you need to learn more about a specific element, you simply have to click on it.
You can assign team members to handle tasks related to certain customers and follow up on team collaborative efforts for every customer.
While Monday.com is a capable CRM software overall, it falls short in some areas. For instance, creating workflows can be confusing. Its document search function is also not as intuitive as we’d like in a CRM.
Monday offers a 14-day free trial, so try it out risk free to assess its suitability for your company.
Pipedrive is an AI powered CRM that helps sales people manage leads and handle repetitive tasks.
Pipedrive’s price tag of $14.90/user/month to $99/user/month can prove costly for those with a beginner budget, so we don’t recommend this tool for anyone working with budget constraints.
Here’s what you can do with Pipedrive:
- Manage leads. Use chats and forms to track leads
- Visualize your sales pipelines for all stages and by team member
- Track all customer communication history, including emails, chats and calls
- Use Pipedrive on mobile and also integrate on mobile with other apps
You can customize Pipedrive’s dashboards to show the most relevant data for your business. You can for instance view deals, whether they were successful or not, and how much revenue they generated.
Pipedrive’s detailed reports give you useful lead-related information such as lead source. You can for instance analyze your source reports to learn the channels bringing you the most leads. Activity reports show details such as calls, emails, meetings and more.
The sales assistant feature is quite a time saver as its recommends areas that would benefit from automation or performance optimization.
That said, the reports filters could do with some improvement to allow more functional deep diving into data.
A short sales cycle is important for closing sales faster and as far as CRM go, Freshworks’ smart sales features are designed to deliver short sales cycles.
With Freshworks, you get an all-round view of customer details and activities, allowing you to run an effective sales process and close deals faster.
Here are some things you can do with Freshworks:
- Capture leads and nurture them into customers
- Track where your leads are in the sales pipeline and optimize the sales process to increase the likelihood of conversion
- Lead scoring and ranking with the AI feature to help you identify leads with a higher conversion likelihood
- Automatically assign sales people to leads
- Automatically convert anyone who fills your web forms into leads
- Automate and create intelligent workflows
- Integrate with different tools to open up more functionalities and get more work done
- Lead segmentation based on customer behavior
Freshworks is a great CRM for showing the entire customer journey at a glance. You can view customer interactions, resolve customer issues, and view all integrations and any issues that may have happened during integration.
Freshworks has a free plan. All other plans range up to $69/user per month, which is quite a decent price range especially if you’ll be closing a lot more sales. If you’d like to upgrade to the paid plans but first need to test more features than are available in the free plan, you can take advantage of their 21-day free trial period.
In a nutshell, although we were quite impressed with Freshworks’ 360 degree customer view and its automation capabilities, we found its loading time too slow. Oher than that, it’s quite a decent CRM for anyone who just needs CRM functions without an entire marketing suite attached.
Salesmate focusses on helping businesses build strong and lasting relationships with their clients by making it easy to create personal experiences that are meaningful to the client.
With this CRM, you can send relevant information to your customers in a timely manner, ensuring a higher likelihood that a customer will engage with you.
Here’s what you can do with Salesmate’s features:
- Use sales sequences to build automated playbooks for every part of the sales cycle
- Keep your team focused by centralizing all team activities in one hub
- Nurture leads with ease using drip campaigns and email sequences
- Never lose a lead: easily funnel leads to the right team members
- Monitor sales performance through the report library
- Integrate with more than 700 apps
- Communicate through the build-in calling and text messaging feature
Salesmate focusses on providing a visual experience, allowing you to view your entire sales process in a simple to use and straightforward interface. It also lets you customize your reports so that you can focus on performance parameters that are most important to you.
Salesmate doesn’t have a free plan. Its cheapest package costs $12/user/month, while its highest package costs $40/user/month. You can also get a customized plan.
Salesmate is certainly impressive. I particularly like the built in calling feature and the ability to quickly connect to contacts through the dialer. But, there are some downsides to this CRM: its email tracking can sometimes be inaccurate. Its scheduler could also use some improvement, to make tracking tasks and events less cumbersome. Page loading is also glitch at times, requiring several refreshes and interfering with a smooth workflow.
Zoho is one CRM that took the online world by storm with its robust offering for small businesses.
This tool provides a 360 degree outlook on your business so that you never miss a crucial sales opportunity.
Zoho does the following:
- Gives you meaningful insights that incorporate data from different functions within your company
- Uses the AI sales assistant for customer profiling making ensuring sales people are working with “cleaner” profiles
- Monitor performance and manage spending through sales forecasting, gamification and territory management features
- Use the sales builder to plan out your entire sales process
- Create a smoother sales process with sales enablement tools. For example, sales scripts and quotes.
- Integrate with over 100 tools
Zoho’s plans make it very scalable. Its free plan accommodates a maximum of 3 users. Overall, we favor this plan for its simplicity, calendar management, predictive analytics, automation, and its data import and export features.
Bottom Line: Which CRM Software Should You Choose?
Customer relationship management (CRM) tools help business owners to store customer information, streamline team collaboration, and manage the sales and marketing process more effectively.
With the best CRM software, you can be better organized, more productive, save time and save costs.
If you would like to run a more efficient and connected organization, nurture and convert more customers, and improve customer satisfaction, try out the best CRM software covered in this article.
Have any questions about our guide to the top CRM tools? Let us know by commenting below.