Every customer has unique needs depending on where they are in the sales pipeline. Some may be in the research phase, comparing apples to apples, while others might be a nudge away from purchasing.
Tailoring your engagement with customers to their stage of the purchasing journey helps build stronger relationships, which is essential for small businesses that want to scale. A customer relationship management system (CRM) is the best way to do this.
A study revealed that 90.2% of small businesses implementing CRM systems showed improved work process efficiency. The same study also showed a 63.4% increase in sales performance, with CRM implementation being the main driving factor.
So, it's clear. If you’re a small business, CRMs are non-negotiables. The question now is, which CRM fits your company best? We’re here to help you figure out just that. Let’s get started.
Benefits of Sales CRMs
CRMs are an integral part of any sales process. They help track sales activities, manage pipelines, forecast sales, improve sales team productivity, and increase customer loyalty. Let's take a closer look:
Tracking Sales Activities
CRMs let you see a bird's-eye view of all sales activities, including emails, calls, meetings, and follow-ups. This ensures every potential sales opportunity is documented and followed through.
That means no leads slip through the cracks. Depending on where they are in the sales process, every lead is met with consistent, relevant, and timely communication.
Managing Pipelines with Greater Insight
Business communication differs for each customer segment. CRMs help visualize the pipelines, ensuring deals are tracked adequately through the various stages, from initial contact to closing.
Sales teams can also quickly identify pipeline bottlenecks to ensure a smoother and more efficient outbound and inbound sales process. Issues are resolved fast, and potential problems are mitigated.
Making Better Sales Predictions
CRMs excel at analyzing historical sales data and the current state of pipelines. This means accurate sales forecasts, better financial planning, and inventory management.
All this data helps businesses make informed decisions, better prepare for potential issues in the sales pipelines, and be more strategic and systemized in the sales process.
Improving Customer Loyalty
CRMs store, track, and analyze customer data to personalize communications that make customers feel valued, reduce churn rates, and lower the rate of at-risk customers.
They collect customer feedback, allowing businesses to refine their offerings, from upsells to product recommendations.
Increasing Productivity
When sales teams don’t have to worry about the manual tasks tied to the sales process, like lead tracking, they become more efficient and optimized in their workflows. CRMs provide sales teams with easy access to comprehensive customer data, contact lists, and sales assets.
What Makes a Sales CRM Worth It for Small Businesses?
As a rule of thumb, you can’t just go for the cheapest CRM available. You have to consider scalability, flexibility, and the following attributes:
It's Budget Friendly
The CRMs you can go for ultimately depend on your budget. As mentioned, the cheapest option might not fit your business needs best, especially if you’re about to scale.
It's crucial to consider the system's ability to integrate with other tools, its ease of use for employees, and the support and maintenance offered by the provider.
There are Integration and Automation Capabilities
CRMs should seamlessly integrate with marketing, sales, and customer support activities at a base level. Think about your existing tech stack.
Does the CRM you’re looking into have native integrations? The constant back-and-forth between apps, downloading and uploading CSVs, and copy-pasting data can slow sales.
Robust Data Collection and Analysis Features
Data is your best friend. But raw data alone won’t do any good. Data must be transformed into information through analysis.
Look for a CRM that lets you analyze customer data and behavior. Some CRMs even offer visualization tools so you can quickly relay to stakeholders what’s happening in your pipelines.
Best Sales CRMs for Small Businesses
The best way to know which CRM fits your business is to try it out yourself, which can take hours of testing and research. To help you streamline the process, here’s our recommendation of the best sales CRM that every small business needs to consider:
Instantly Dealflow CRM
Finally, you don’t have to jump between your outreach, prospecting, and lead management tools. Everything comes together, streamlining sales cycles from the first cold email to final negotiations.
We know the sales cycle can get complicated. That’s why we simplified our CRM and stripped it down to the essentials. The best part is that Dealflow directly syncs with your Instantly inboxes.
Every prospect who replies to your cold emails can be directly sent to your CRM with custom tags, helping you segment each prospect. You can even directly respond to interested leads from the CRM, add critical notes about the prospect, or have Instantly’s Unibox AI inbox assistant handle replies.
Each tag acts as a segment sales pipeline. For example, leads tagged as “Interested” can be added to a nurturing campaign with content for middle or bottom-of-funnel leads.
Dealflow also takes your average deal value and assigns it to your leads, making you more accurate with your sales forecasting.
Hubspot
Hubspot has one of the best free CRMs on the market. It’s intuitive, and users quickly access a treasure trove of educational data on all of Hubspot’s key CRM features.
If you’re looking for a tool to store, manage, and organize leads, HubSpot's free version can do just the trick. But, if you’re looking to send emails to these leads, automate replies, and set up custom sales pipelines, that’s where it will cost you.
The paid version is still affordable and worth the depth of features. With the paid version, you get advanced analytics, automation features, and more control over your customer data.
But remember, Hubspot isn’t great at outbound lead generation like cold email marketing at scale. What it’s good at is automating replies, follow-ups, and nurturing leads in your CRM.
Pipedrive
Pipedrive is an intuitive CRM that leverages AI to manage leads, forecast revenue, and present sales reps with the next best action for each lead. It connects all customer data in one place, letting you monitor KPIs, create realistic goals, and build better sales strategies.
Sales teams don’t even have to use Pipedrive manually. The Professional Tier lets you access their AI Sales Assistant, which helps with lead routing, team management, and automated follow-ups.
If you want to automate more than just your lead management, Pipedrive also offers add-ons that let you add chatbots, lead generation tools, and web forms to your lead capture pages. Leads gathered from these channels are then directly added to your Pipedrive CRM.
Salesforce
Salesforce's array of tools and features blend intuitiveness and robustness. But even with all the advanced tools, it’s still affordable for small businesses.
It connects marketing, sales, and commerce in one platform, letting reps focus on closing sales instead of managing leads through pipelines. When all data is centralized, it’s easier to track KPIs, find early signs of bottlenecks, and iterate on winning sales strategies that drive growth.
Salesforce also has lead scoring, personalized follow-up features, and scalable plans for businesses ready to implement more complex sales workflows. If you have various apps in your tech stack, Salesforce seamlessly integrates with hundreds of marketing and sales tools.
Trello
Trello is the simplest, most flexible tool here. It’s not necessarily a CRM, but it can be. At its core, a CRM tag leads and visualizes how they go through your pipeline. Trello does just that.
A sales team can assign reps to handle prospects, segment leads based on interest, and engage with customers collaboratively and organizedly.
Trello is completely customizable. You can create Cards and Boards depending on your needs. If you get Buttler with Trello, you can automate task assignments and lead bumping.
Let’s say a sales rep already did a discovery call with a prospect. Buttler can automatically move the prospect to the next stage, assign an account executive for a demo, and send a calendar invitation to both the prospect and the account executive.
ClickUp CRM
ClickUp is a freemium CRM with many powerful features, even with the free version. If you like the workflow, the paid plan starts at $7, making it a no-brainer CRM for small businesses.
ClickUp has a hierarchy, starting with workspaces, spaces, folders, and lists. This allows businesses to organize and systemize lead management to the T.
Sales, marketing, and customer support can each have workspaces, complete with the relevant folders and task lists. Each workspace also includes visual metrics of customer and sales data.
Their business plan, starting at $12/month, lets you use ClickUp’s AI features. You get advanced automation features like email follow-ups, automated task updates, and reports.
Freshworks
Freshworks offers a generous free plan with all the essential features small businesses need to manage leads down their pipelines.
The free plan even gets integrated ticketing across social media and email. This feature lets you convert email and social media inquiries into tickets you can track, prioritize, and reply to without leaving the Freshdesk app.
Freshworks also has a deal management feature. It can assign deal values, assign reps tasks, and qualify leads to ensure they’re ready to move to the next stages of the sales process.
If you choose their $15/month Business Plan, you get email integration features. These let you send and receive emails within Freshworks, keeping all communications in one platform.
Zoho
Zoho can automate custom workflows, campaigns, and customer journeys through your pipeline. You get a detailed visual of your analytics, including revenue, sales stages, and growth opportunities.
Zoho users also have access to Zia, their AI sales assistant. Zia can make predictions based on customer data and insights to help sales reps take the next best step for each lead.
Even if you’re on the go, Zia can easily be accessed through your mobile phone. It provides all the lead data reps need to close deals, whether in person or remotely.
However, the AI and forecasting features are only available on the enterprise plan. But don’t let the “enterprise” label fool you. At $40/month, it’s one of the most affordable enterprise tools.
Teamsale
Teamsale combines lead management and outreach in one platform. You get to send prospects in your CRM emails, SMS, or call them without leaving the dashboard.
What’s great about Teamsale is the clean and simple UI. There aren’t any fancy new AI assistants or stunning data visualizations. Instead, it offers essentials like sales analysis, task assignment features, call rerouting, and email outreach.
Teamsale also has a free plan that has all the essential CRM features except outbound calling. To get 2000 free outgoing minutes, you need to subscribe to the office plan for $26 monthly.
HelloBonsai
HelloBonsai is best for businesses looking for a CRM that comes with a client portal. Think coaching, consultancy, architecture, or accounting industries.
Their CRM offers custom tagging features and lets you create your own lead-scoring methodology. Paired with Bonsai Forms, businesses have a streamlined method for filling up pipelines in their CRMs.
If you go with HelloBonsai’s Professional plan, you can access their AI Workflow automation features, branded client portals, and integrations to tools like Zapier, Calendly, and Quickbooks.
Key Takeaways
Every small business needs a CRM to properly manage leads and customers in their pipelines. To recap, the CRMs you should go for fit within your budget, have integration and automation features, and analyze customer data for forecasting. Here are the tools we recommend that match these criteria:
- Dealflow is an affordable CRM within Instantly that combines lead management with cold email outreach. It lets users track leads, automate replies, and forecast sales opportunities.
- Hubspot and Pipedrive are easy-to-use CRMs with email automation capabilities for lead nurturing and follow-ups. However, they’re not advisable for cold email marketing.
- Salesforce and ClickUp have powerful AI features that can forecast revenue, spot potential sales bottlenecks, and automate task assignments for sales teams.
If you need a CRM built for cold email marketing, Dealflow should be at the top of your list. Try it out for free today.
