CRM, or customer relationship management, is a pretty self-explanatory concept: doing things to maintain a good relationship between you and your customers. Or, in simpler terms, keeping your customers happy.
What is less, self-explanatory is putting CRM into action. This is partly because it is such a broad and all-encompassing term, as there is so much that goes into managing relationships with customers.
It isn’t all about how you converse with them.
CRM involves:
- Gathering information on customers, so you are prepared to talk to them
- Keeping your entire team up to date on customer interactions
- Creating processes to more efficiently help customers
- And so much more
Luckily, there are tons of CRM tools designed to help with precisely that.
These tools help with:
- Gathering data
- Storing information
- Communication with customers
- Acquiring leads and customers
- Analysing processes
- Automation
But what tool(s) should you use? There are so many!
That is why we took it upon ourselves to put together a list of the 10 best CRM tools and software available. Take a look!
Source: Monday
Monday is like an easier to use and more aesthetically pleasing excel spreadsheet for tracking your clients.
It’s a single platform that contains all of the information on your clients and customers that everyone can see.
Monday also helps with task managing, showing you:
- Tasks that are being worked on
- Completed tasks
- Tasks that need to be done and their urgency
- Deadlines
That way, no one misses a thing, and no customer is left waiting.
One of the best parts about Monday is that you can use it to more efficiently and effectively communicate with clients.
This is done by sharing dashboards with your clients which they can update with requests.
When a customer adds a request, you receive a notification from Monday with information on the request and what needs to be done.
You can then update the dashboard so that the client can see updates on their request, such as:
- When it is being worked on
- How long it is expected to take
- Who is working on it
- How much it will cost
Monday pricing per seat (1 seat = 1 team member) per month:
- 14-day free trial
- Basic- £8
- Standard- £10
- Pro- £16
- Enterprise- Contact Monday for pricing
Pricing for the five-seat annual plan:
- 14-day free trial
- Basic- £39 monthly
- Standard- £49 monthly
- Pro- £79 monthly
- Enterprise- Contact Monday for pricing
Source: WhatsApp
Wait, isn’t WhatsApp just a texting app?
Yes.
So why is it on this list?
Great question.
First, texting can be a great way to communicate with clients about smaller things in an efficient manner, like confirming a meeting or asking/answering a yes or no question.
Group chats also help ensure everyone is on the same page when you and several of your employees are working with multiple people from the same company.
But there are a few features specific to WhatsApp that make it a great CRM tool over just using a normal texting group chat:
- Voice notes– You can send short voice recordings with WhatsApp as a text message that your recipients can listen to without downloading anything. This allows you to convey tone and personality, explain complex concepts easier and send messages on the go.
- Reply function– This allows you to quote a previous text when replying in a group chat, so there is no confusion on what you are referring to or to whom you are responding.
- Wifi– Messages on WhatsApp are sent over Wifi, meaning you can text clients and customers no matter where they are in the world without having to worry about extra charges from your mobile provider
For more on how to use WhatsApp as a CRM tool, check out this article on HubSpot!
WhatsApp pricing- Free!
Source: Trello
Trello is essentially a to-do list dashboard that everyone can see.
Each team member gets their own board, where they can add cards of what they are working on.
Within each card, you can:
- Write notes
- Create a checklist to see progress
- Include a description of the task
- Attach Files
- Add other members if you are working on the task with them
- Leave comments
- Make a due date
Everyone can see everyone’s Trello board; that way, your entire team can stay up to date on what people are working on. You can add cards to each other’s board too if you need to assign tasks.
You can also give your customers access so they can add cards to your board, or get their own so they can keep you updated on what they are doing.
Trello pricing per user per month:
- Free plan- £0
- Business Class- £12.50 or £9.99 billed annually
- Enterprise- Depends on the number of users
Source: HubSpot
HubSpot has several high-quality software for different aspects of a business, and that includes CRM.
Their Customer Service software is the closest thing you’ll get to a “social media” CRM in its design, layout and the way it functions.
With HubSpot’s CRM tool, you get a regularly updated look at your entire sales funnel.
It also gives you information on your leads and clients, as well as updates on what they are doing (like emails and tweets) and gathers all of your previous interactions/conversations you had with them.
In addition, this CRM tool has features such as:
- Lead generation and email automation
- Live chat that automatically routes users to the right people on your services team
- Converts frequently asked questions into a searchable database that your customers can use
- A “tickets tool” that gathers and displays your customers’ issues for your entire team to see
And the best part?
HubSpot has a free plan with no limit!
No free trial or limited version. You get access to tons of great stuff, no charge!
There are of course premium versions with some extra goodies.
HubSpot pricing per month:
- Starter- £50 or £45 billed annually
- Professional- £500 or £450 billed annually
- Enterprise- £1,200
Source: Salesflare
Salesflare is your one-stop-shop for EVERYTHING you need to know about communicating with customers.
Salesflare takes your contacts from your address book and automatically updates them with all known contact information.
But it doesn’t stop there. Because Salesflare also:
- Goes through social media profiles, websites and even email signatures to gather even MORE information
- Logs meetings, phone calls and emails so you can see past conversations
- Digitally organises files that are exchanged between you and your customers
- Notifies you when a customer interacts with you digitally (on social media for example)
- Has a dashboard where you can organise your leads based on how qualified they are
With Salesflare, you will essentially have all of the information you’ll need on your customers, prospects and leads, ensuring you’ll be fully prepared before contacting them while saving you tons of time.
£35 per user per month or £30 billed annually
Source: Google Workspace
Google has a ton of cloud-based apps, such as
- Docs
- Drive- storage
- Spreadsheet
- Meet- video conferencing
- Calendar
- Slides
- Forms
And so much more.
Using these apps are great for a business because it allows your employees and customers to easily share documents and seamlessly collaborate on projects because of their cloud-based nature.
For example, you, three of your employees and your customer can see and edit a spreadsheet AT THE SAME TIME!
Now, you can get access to all of these apps for free with a Google account.
But with Google Workspace, everyone’s account falls under your company. And, depending on the plan you pick, you get upgrades for your apps like:
- An increase in storage
- Expanded video conferencing and the ability to record
- Security management
Google Workspace pricing per user per month:
- Business starter- £6
- Business standard- £12
- Business plus- £18
- Enterprise- Contact Google for pricing
Source: Sugar CRM
Sugar CRM promises a “high definition-customer experience” or “HD-CX.”
It does this by recording every “change event” in your customer’s journey with you. It then displays this information on an open-sourced platform with easy to read graphics, charts and timelines, such as:
- Sales pipelines
- Forecast bar charts
- Activity streams
Sugar CRM’s platform is also customisable, meaning it can be tailored to fit every business’ needs.
And the cloud-based technology and integration with multiple 3rd party programs and software allow for seamless collaboration from anywhere.
What can really set this tool apart from others though is its AI. Because not only can it predict future outcomes, but it can do so with incomplete and limited data, meaning you’ll be getting more accurate predictions with less work.
Cost – Per user per month (billed annually)
- Seven-day free trial
- Sugar Professional- $52
- Sugar Enterprise- $85
- Sugar Serve- $80
- Sugar Sell- $80
- Sugar Market- $1,000 (per month for 10k contracts)
Source: Salesforce
For an extremely popular and well-known company that offers tons of products, including an award-winning CRM service, Salesforce is the way to go.
The Salesforce CRM is completely customisable with a pay-as-you-go-model.
And their cloud-based model with mobile options that track sales activities while giving you instantaneous customer updates makes it so everyone is on the same page at all times.
Salesforce also offers multiple CRM categories and systems, including:
- Sales Cloud
- Marketing Cloud
- Service Cloud
- Analytics Cloud
- Data Cloud
- Community Cloud
- App Cloud
- IoT
Salesforce will help your team’s efficiency as well. It can streamline the sales process by allowing any sales rep to:
- Use data
- Generate leads
- Follow-up on customers
- Manage account activity
- Check campaign status
And do much more with ease.
With tons of customisable plans for small and large businesses, there will be a great and affordable option for you.
Check out their pricing options here, as they have too many to list in this review.
Source: Pipedrive
Pipedrive is another CRM tool that tracks customer data and has a visual and customisable sales pipeline that you and all of your employees can see.
What makes Pipedrive different is how easy it is to use.
It’s a very intuitive tool but also does so much.
For example, you can call, text or email customers right from the platform. Pipedrive then logs any of this communication.
Its central dashboard- where the tool displays all of your customers along your sales pipeline- is also straightforward but effective, and allows for customisation with ease. The same is true of dashboards with data and information represented visually with charts and graphs.
And Pipedrive has some great automation tools, like sending follow-ups and notifying a Slack channel when there are updates or changes with customers.
Pipedrive pricing plans (per user per month billed annually):
- Essential- £12.50
- Advanced- £24.90
- Professional- £49.90
- Enterprise- £99.00 (minimum 10 users)
Source: Slack
Texting and group chats are great for quick communication but aren’t sufficient enough to share big files and to really collaborate on projects.
You can, of course, share those files in emails, but now you’re involving multiple devices and platforms. Plus, email trails can get confusing, and people take longer to respond to them.
If only there were a way to combine the two.
Well, there is, and it’s called Slack.
Slack is an online communication platform that combines the rapid response and simplicity of text messaging with the file-sharing and mass communication aspect of email.
Within a Slack workspace, you can create different threads that look like group chats on your computer. Within each thread, you then invite different employees and customers depending on who is needed and communicate by sending text messages like a group chat while also being able to send files and documents easily.
It essentially makes collaboration way easier and more efficient.
Slack is perfect for making company-wide announcements or putting together a small group of employees to collaborate on a project.
Plus, there is a mobile version so that no one will miss a message.
Slack pricing per person per month billed annually:
- Standard- £6.67
- Plus- £12.50
- Enterprise grid- contact for pricing
Aritic PinPoint is a full-stack marketing automation software platform for marketing operations teams or SMEs. It helps you to build relationships with leads, automate marketing campaigns and convert leads to paying customers easily.
PinPoint is designed and developed to be mobile-friendly. You can keep a tab on your leads’ activities without having to sign in from your desktop only. PinPoint works seamlessly and with equal ease on any and every device.
With PinPoint, you can build customized landing pages using the landing page builder feature. Other features like lead scoring, lead tracking, lead nurturing, give a better insight into user behavior and actions.
In Addition, this CRM Tool has features such as
- Email campaign management
- Email campaign automation
- Marketing campaign builder
- A/B testing
- Website tracking features with marketing file and library management
PinPoint integrates with Salesforce, SugarCRM, Zoho CRM making it easy to transfer your leads to the CRM when they become your paid customers. It also allows integration of Social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, Google Plus, Foursquare, Instagram.
With social media integration, you can collect more leads via various groups and communities.
PinPoint is perfect for a marketer to get going from Day one. It is user-friendly and is easy to understand in seconds.
You can sign up for a free trial and then move on to explore more with the Paid features of Aritic PinPoint. There are three different paid plans to choose from Business, Premium, and Gold. Each plan is uniquely designed to suit your marketing requirements to the optimum.
You can also view a direct comparison between the available plans on the website itself. PinPoint is simple, power-packed, secured, pocket-friendly, and a transparent marketing tool.
Try this simple yet powerful tool for all your marketing needs. In case you have any suggestions, PinPoint has a separate ‘feedback’ section wherein you can post your feedback details. PinPoint is very serious about its users and hence makes it a point to improve every minute.
Aritic Starting Price
$19/month for Lite
$99/month for Professional
$149/month for Enterprise
Engagebay is an all-in-one solution for your sales, marketing and support team. Plus, it comes with its free forever CRM.
You can use EngageBay right from the top of the funnel to gather an idea about user persona and utilize it till you close your deal.
With EngageBay as your CRM software, you can:
- Eliminate the miscommunication between the sales and marketing team by easily passing the data from one department to another.
- Support team can ask for technical assistance and request training materials from the marketing team.
- Track the ongoing deal in the pipeline and compare won vs lost deals.
- Schedule appointments seamlessly internally as well as externally.
- Schedule social media posts and email marketing campaigns.
- Create visually appealing web forms and landing pages to nurture more leads.
And a lot more.
Plus, the support team can manage and organize the support tickets using the EngageBay dashboard. Support teams can view new, open and closed tickets and check for customer satisfaction against each ticket.
If you want to track all your sales and marketing efforts, EngageBay offers a reporting feature. You can track the closed and open deals, visualize pipeline deals and track call breakdowns through a centralized reporting dashboard.
Pricing
EngageBay has a free forever to use CRM for up to 15 users.
If you want to add more users, you can choose between three pricing plans per user per month (billed annually):
- Basic Plan: $11.69
- Growth Plan: $22.49
- Pro Plan: $44.99
NAKIVO Backup & Replication is an all-in-one backup and recovery solution that can help you maintain control over your CRM data in case you lose the originals due to a ransomware attack or any other disaster. In case you use a NAS device to keep CRM data available, NAS backup software from NAKIVO can help you significantly enhance the security of that data.
- With the intuitive web-based interface, you can manage backups and data protection workflows from any location with an internet connection.
- An intuitive dashboard enables you to configure automatic incremental and application-aware backups running on a schedule or on demand, set flexible retention policies for each backup, and initiate recovery workflows whenever necessary.
- You can use the NAKIVO solution to make backup copies stored on your NAS, Linux-based or cloud (Amazon S3, Wasabi, Backblaze B2, Azure Blob) storage immutable, thus protecting the data from unauthorized alteration or deletion. Immutable backups can be used for recovery even if ransomware reaches your NAS repository.
The NAKIVO solution is available with two licensing models:
- A subscription is charged per month and charged per workload that you need to protect. Prices start from $2.5 per workload/month. This license comes with 24/7 tech support.
A perpetual license is charged per CPU socket and starts from $229/socket.
Conclusion
And there you have it!
A list of the 10 best CRM tools available!
With any of these CRM tools, you’ll be able to run a more efficient business with better communication, which, of course, will lead to some happy customers.
So what are you waiting for! Go try one today!
For more tool reviews, go check out our blogs!
You can get reviews of SEO tools at Pearl Lemon, and reviews of lead generation tools at Pearl Lemon Leads.
