The Best CRM Tools for Small Business Owners

You can still remember the first days your small business was in operation.

Those were scary times, wondering if you’d bring in enough revenue to stay afloat. Since then, months have passed, and your business is beginning to get its first real taste of success and growth.

With growth comes new customers, thus the need for customer relationship management or CRM software.

Manually performing tasks is no longer a viable option.

So what do you do?

Get a CRM software; it’s that easy.

But choosing one that suits your business needs and your budget? That’s the tricky part!

Fortunately, we have done the homework for you. In this blog post, we’ll show you the benefits of using a CRM software, how to choose appropriately, and the six best CRM tools for small businesses:

EngageBay
Hubspot
Salesflare
Pipedrive
Freshsales
Insightly

Let’s go!

Why Do Small Businesses Need to Use CRM?

Before you read our reviews of the best CRM tools for small businesses, it might help to read a bit about why you need a small business CRM software in the first place.

As your customer base grows, how will you keep track of everyone? If two members of your sales team are talking to Bob the customer, when you thought it was just one, that can be confusing to Bob. He may feel overwhelmed and decide to duck out, and you might lose a customer.

If you have 100 emails to send out to your customers, will you remember to follow up with the ones who responded to you yesterday? Or will those messages get buried in a deluge of incoming emails?

What you spend on a CRM solution now can come back to you in the form of qualified leads, retained customers, and more successful marketing and sales campaigns.

What about potential new customers? When a lead comes in, what do you know about them? How will you determine if they’re qualified? Having your sales team try to convert unqualified leads is a waste of everyone’s time.

That misspent time also chews into a salesperson’s day, leaving them with less time to dedicate to money-making tasks.

Can’t read a long blog post? This video says it all:

You need CRM for your small business for all those reasons and more.

What Are the Benefits of CRM Software?

If you’re still not convinced that a small business CRM software is the best idea for your company, we think this next section will change your mind.

Here are some benefits that only companies with active CRM implementation enjoy.

A More Productive, Profitable Team

Trying to get all business tasks done without a CRM tool wastes a lot of time, as mentioned. Besides the issues mentioned above, your company may lose time in many other ways.

Perhaps the most time-consuming task companies invest in is manual customer data entry. Also, you don’t necessarily have all past customer data without CRM software, such as the history of interactions with a customer.

Your sales team is also missing detailed analytics that may predict future successes.

Time is money. Each minute your sales team spends doing anything but selling is costing your company lost revenue.

Small business owners who depend so much on every last cent of revenue can’t afford to take a careless approach.

benefits of best CRM tools for small businesses — *Source: ScienceSoft*

Happier Customers

Customers like to feel understood. When your sales team can look at interaction records and learn what kind of sales approaches work (and which don’t), they can take a personalized approach to communications that any customer will appreciate.

Other little things, such as following up on time, add up. With CRM, you can keep your customers happier, so they stick around longer. This helps improve your customer lifetime value.

More Qualified Leads

Your small business may not struggle to get leads after a while, but what about qualified ones? Lead scoring systems offered by CRM software can determine which leads you should disqualify and which you must pursue.

Without a lead scoring system, you’re playing a guessing game.

That’s especially true if more than one member of your sales team filters leads without a CRM system, as they may not have the same criteria for what makes a good lead.

Once you switch to a CRM software, you can set the rules that qualify a lead and then stick with those rules. The software will filter the leads, so you know whether or not the leads are really interested in your products and services.

Reliable Sales Reporting and Predictions

How much money did your small business make in sales last month? What will that number look like in five months? Any small business CRM software offering reports and analytics tools will tell you the whole story.

Without that, you’re again guessing, but this time with your whole company riding on the results.

The customer data you have now will be useful years into the future as you go back and see how far along your small business has come.

The sooner you have that data readily available in a CRM software, the better off you’ll be.

6 of The Best CRM Tools for Small Businesses

We’ve narrowed it down to six of the best CRM tools for small businesses on the market today.

To reiterate from the intro, these are EngageBay, HubSpot, Salesflare, Pipedrive, Freshsales, and Insightly.

In this section, we will go in-depth into each of your CRM options, exploring company history, features, integrations, and pricing.

We’ll even share some pros and cons so that you can make an informed decision.

#1. EngageBay

What Is It?

One of the best CRM software for small businesses is undoubtedly EngageBay.

Founded in 2017 by Sreedhar Ambati, EngageBay is an all-in-one marketing, sales, and customer support software with free integrated CRM.

Features

EngageBay breaks up its features into four products: the Service Bay, CRM & Sales Bay, Marketing Bay, and the All-in-One Suite.

Here’s a closer look at the features offered:

No limit on users: No matter how many users you decide to add to your CRM, you never have to pay extra for it when you’re using EngageBay.
Call integration: The CRM Telephony feature allows you to enhance your interactions with your customers by tracking conversations and interactions among customers and potential customers. You and your team can then look back on this info later and use it to plan future sales and business decisions.
Lead scoring: To separate your would-be customers from those who aren’t interested, you need lead scoring. With EngageBay, you can determine your qualified leads to drive more sales and conversions.
Email syncing: EngageBay allows you to integrate your email with the CRM software. With 2-way sync, you can access all your emails right from the platform and vice-versa.
Gamification and leaderboards for the sales team: Few things motivate sales teams more than healthy competition. EngageBay lets you use both gamification and leaderboards to see who’s at the top of the game.
Rich sales reporting: EngageBay’s sales reporting module presents rich data that you can customize to best suit your small business. Display metrics like growth, revenue, and leads converted in charts, bar graphs, and more.
Automated data entry and meeting schedule: From call notes to emails and phone calls, you and your team don’t have to spend valuable time adding this data manually into your CRM platform. EngageBay automates data entry and countless other tasks for convenience and productivity, such as meeting scheduling.
Workflows: All members of your small business sales team will stay on task with EngageBay’s workflows. These let your staff see what’s in progress and who needs following up, so no tasks are forgotten.
HelpDesk and LiveChat: EngageBay offers a host of customer support tools, including a traditional ticketing system and LiveChat.

Integrations

EngageBay offers dozens of popular integrations so that you can expand the functionalities of the platform by connecting with your favorite apps. CallHippo, Digioh, DocuSign, Quickbooks, Xero, Plivo, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and Mandrill are some of the popular ones.

Pricing

As mentioned, EngageBay’s CRM is always free to use.

The free plan includes live chat, helpdesk, landing pages, and lead grabbers.

EngageBay is one of the best tools for small business establishments like yours as you can take advantage of sequences, email broadcasting, autoresponders, and email marketing to 500 contacts under the free plan as well. You also get a host of customer service tools.

You pay $14.99 a month for 1,000 contacts by upgrading to the Basic Plan. Besides the above, you get additional features such as a tag manager, social suite, SMS marketing, lead scoring, landing page design, pop-ups, and email templates. You also get customer service tools like canned responses, ticket views and macros, and group management.

The Growth Plan for $49.99 a month lets you reach 50,000 contacts monthly. This plan also adds proposals, customer service automation, call records, and a custom domain. You can also use the landing page and broadcast A/B testing, site messages, push notifications, and marketing automation under the Growth plan.

For the small businesses requiring pro tools, the Pro plan at $79.99 a month should suit you. You can reach unlimited contacts and use all the features above. In addition, you gain phone support, uptime SLA, a dedicated account manager, and custom reporting. EngageBay offers phone customer support in its Pro plan.

Pros and Cons

To wrap up, here are our pros and cons for using EngageBay as your CRM tool of choice.

Pros

EngageBay is always free, ideal for small businesses with a tight budget.
The company was founded to serve startups and small businesses like yours.
Super affordable alternative to HubSpot.

EngageBay review on G2 — EngageBay customer review

Cons

Can add more integrations and templates.