Now is the time to upgrade your CRM and consolidate as many different systems and services you use to manage your small business.
Top 15 CRM software for Small Businesses (2023)
As we start to wind up 2022, a lot of small businesses are already preparing for the new year by updating their software, improving processes and refreshing their customer experience.
Over the past few years, there have been significant improvements across CRM services in many categories, and we’re seeing a convergence of tools and services.
Now is the time to upgrade your CRM and consolidate as many different systems and services you use to manage your small business. Imagine never needing to store your customer details in a .csv file for importing leads into an email marketing software or managing a sales pipeline. Now it’s possible.
Before you may have had to pay for 6+ different software subscriptions to manage your customer lists, send email campaigns, web chat, manage your website, take inbound calls on your computer and more.
Overall, there’s quite a few different solutions that can achieve all of this, and depending on your budget and scale of your business, you may have different needs.
If you’re a small business, there’s really two excellent CRM solutions that you should consider:
Of course, there are bigger and enterprise solutions out there (like Salesforce) but if you’re a small business, and you just need to focus on getting stuff done, then we’ll break down why you should use either Pipedrive or Hubspot.
The full list
The full list of CRM software for small businesses we might recommend include:
- Pipedrive is probably the #1 rated CRM for small business, and even larger organisations
- Hubspot is another excellent CRM, used by over 150k+ businesses with lots of capability
- PandaDoc can help you manage your deals, leads and sales pipelines
- Shopify is excellent if you’re selling consumer goods and managing order fulfilment online
- Freshworks to help your sales executives build lasting relationships with customers
- Freshdesk can help you manage post-sales service enquiries
- FreeAgent CRM is the #1 alternative to Salesforce
- Capsule for building stronger relationships and managing sales
- Paperflite is a great way to build microsite and manage your leads
- Keap helps 125k+ businesses with CRM and sales automation
- Shore is an excellent digital solution to manage your business
- Salesflare helps you focus on sales by eliminating data entry
- Sellfy is designed to build beautiful online stores
- VipeCloud is an all-in-one CRM, Marketing, Social Media platform
- 20NINE CRM for managing clients, sales, communications and documents
1. Why you should consider Pipedrive
You should try Pipedrive now because there’s a 14-day trial, and we couldn’t recommend an easier CRM.
Pipedrive is probably the #1 rated CRM for small business, it’s incredibly easy to use, and the features are outstanding. If you’re selling a consumer product or service, then Pipedrive is excellent for managing sales leads, communicating with your customers and providing post-sales support.
The best thing about Pipedrive, is it’s pricing structure is really clear and transparent, and you know what you’re getting.
Let’s break down some of the key benefits of Pipedrive.
Setup your pipeline
A pipeline is essentially your sales funnel. You can easily create the different stages of your sales funnel or use an existing template. Then it’s really easy to add your deals or import them automatically from a spreadsheet or another CRM.
- Use the visual sales pipeline at a glance
- Capture more leads with a lead generation tool set
- See who’s browsing your website and which content they engaged with
Track your sales progress
Next, you can setup automatic alerts and reminders, so you can keep your deals on track. Pipedrive is excellent for managing sales forecasts and you can view the progress of your leads.
- Manage all of your quote and proposals in one place
- Send email marketing campaigns and optimise content to improve conversion
Growth automation
Pipedrive has inbuilt AI and automation to help you find opportunities to close more sales. You can setup activities and automated tasks so you can minimise routine effort and admin work.
2. Why you should consider HubSpot
Hubspot is another excellent alternative CRM, and it’s used by over 150,000 businesses around the world. It’s probably a bit better suited to businesses who provide consultation or professional services, including managing bespoke quotes for jobs (e.g. residential construction projects and the like).
Hubspot is a little bit like Salesforce, it has different modules, and you can choose to only pay for one module, or get the whole suite.
HubSpot’s CRM platform has all the tools and integrations you need for marketing, sales, content management, and customer service. Each product in the platform is powerful alone, but the real magic happens when you use them together.
Manage your projects
HubSpot Projects is one place for all your tasks, files, and communication. It integrates with the rest of your HubSpot Marketing tools so you can easily manage your projects with the same software you use to execute them.
Send marketing campaigns
With Marketing Hub, all your marketing tools and data are on one easy-to-use, powerful platform. You’ll save valuable time and get all the context you need to provide a personalized experience that attracts and converts the right customers at scale.
Sales CRM
Sales Hub eliminates friction by bringing all your tools and data together on one easy-to-use, powerful CRM platform your whole team will love.
Service management
Service Hub connects all your customer service data and channels on one CRM platform, so you can easily support, retain, and grow your customer base. This means you’ll deliver better customer service management, and delight your customers at every stage of the journey.
Website development
Finally, HubSpot lets you manage your website. The content management system makes it easy to create and personalize website pages for every visitor — optimized for conversion across every device. Rely on developers as much or as little as you’d like.
Now is the time to get your business ready for the new year, and setup your CRM to take advantage of the significant growth in AI and automation. By upgrading your CRM now you’ll be able to automate a lot of repetitive tasks, and easily manage marketing and growth opportunities.
The more you consolidate your business operations into a single CRM that can handle all of your customer data end-to-end will help you simplify you business operations so you can focus on the things that matter most — your product and service design, sales and customer support.
Originally published at Good Business Kit.
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