What is CRM Software? How it Works + Top CRM Software Reviewed

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The best CRM software lets you manage your customer interactions and streamline multiple sales processes to enhance internal tracking and management of your sales teams. With the best CRM tool, you’ll be able to identify potential customers quicker, track sales opportunities more efficiently, shorten the sales cycle, and smoothen customer interactions.

However, finding the best customer relationship management software is a lot like finding a needle in a haystack. We’ve found and reviewed in detail the best CRM software for all your business needs based on criteria such as integration capabilities, pricing, and features; plus, we’ll answer questions like what is CRM software? What does CRM software do? Read on to learn more.

What is CRM Software?

CRM software is a powerful tool that helps businesses manage customer relationships more effectively. It’s a type of software that provides a centralized platform for storing and organizing customer data.

CRM software lets businesses keep track of their interactions with customers, both past and present, and use that information to understand their needs and preferences better.

Additionally, you can use CRM software to automate various tasks related to customer management, such as email marketing, sales forecasting, and customer service.

Businesses can save time and resources by automating these tasks and focusing on building stronger customer relationships. Ultimately, CRM software helps businesses deliver a better customer experience, which can lead to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

What Does a CRM Software Do?

CRM software is designed to help businesses manage customer relationships more effectively by providing a centralized platform for storing and organizing customer data.

This data can be accessed and used by various teams within the business, such as sales, marketing, and customer service. CRM software also provides tools for automating tasks related to customer management, such as sending emails, making sales forecasts, and providing customer service.

These automation tools can help businesses save time and resources and focus on building stronger relationships with their customers.

In addition, CRM software often includes features that allow companies to track and analyze customer interactions and behaviors, which can provide valuable insights into customer preferences and needs.

This information can help businesses tailor their marketing and sales efforts to meet their customers’ needs better and improve their overall customer experience.

Why You Need CRM Software for Your Business | Key Benefits

Wondering why your business needs CRM software? Let’s give you some concrete reasons you cannot ignore.

Improved Collaboration 

A valuable feature of a CRM system is that it provides a single system of record. Multichannel data is merged to create a 360-degree overview of the customer. One window provides access to all customer information, including their interactions with the business.

Information between employees and departments is no longer siloed. Everyone on the team can access the digital profile to gather actionable insights. There isn’t any redundancy. Nothing gets lost or overlooked.

A CRM keeps everyone on the same page to better serve the customer.

Increased Efficiency

CRM software can automate many tasks related to customer management, such as sending emails, making sales forecasts, and providing customer service.

This can help businesses save time and resources and focus on building stronger relationships with their customers. By automating these tasks, firms can free up their employees to work on more value-added tasks, such as creating innovative ideas and consumer engagement strategies.

Enhanced Sales and Marketing

CRM software will fetch insights into customer behavior and preferences, which can help businesses tailor their marketing and sales efforts to meet the needs of their customers.

By understanding customer needs and preferences, companies can create targeted marketing campaigns and personalized sales approaches that are more likely to be successful.

By using CRM software to track and analyze customer data, businesses can also identify trends and patterns that can inform their marketing and sales efforts and help them better understand their customers’ needs and preferences.

Better Decision-Making

The best CRM apps will help businesses make more informed decisions about how to best engage with and serve their customers by tracking and analyzing customer data.

This data can include customer demographics, communication, and purchase history and help businesses identify trends and patterns that can inform their decision-making.

Overall, CRM software will be an ally for businesses and assist them in making better, more data-driven decisions about engaging with and serving their customers.

By using CRM software to track and analyze customer data, companies can make more informed decisions about allocating resources and optimizing customer engagement strategies.

Best CRM Software Solutions| Top 10 Shortlist

Salesforce is a clear winner and the best CRM software in 2023, boasting features like excellent lead tracking, personalized customer support, unmatched integration features, and an intuitive dashboard. However, the other options can be worthy picks too. See for yourself:

1. Salesforce — Overall, the Best CRM Software in 2023 | Try it Now With the 14-Day Free Trial.
2. Pipedrive — The Best CRM Software for Email Campaigns and Marketing Processes | Put it to the Test With the 14-Day Free Trial.
3. Zoho CRM — The Best CRM for Small Businesses with a Mobile App for On-the-go Use | Test it Free for 15-Days.
4. Monday Sales CRM — Best Free CRM App with Marketing Automation with Personalized Email Templates.
5. Zendesk Sell — The Best CRM System to Boost Your Sales Team’s Productivity | Offers a Generous 30-Day Free Trial.
6. HubSpot — Leading Customer Relationship Management Tool to Shorten Sales Cycle and Manage Sales Pipelines.
7. Freshsales — Free CRM Software to Create a Personalized Sales Experience for Your Leads.
8. Maximizer CRM — Leading CRM App for Detailed Reports on Customer Interactions.
9. Less Annoying CRM — A Popular Beginner-Friendly CRM App for Small and Mid-size Businesses.
10. Oracle NetSuite — Quality CRM App for Automating Multiple Business Processes.

Best CRM Tools | Top 10 Reviewed

Keen to learn more about our top picks for the best CRM Software? Read on as we discuss the best features, pros, cons, and pricing of each CRM tool we’ve picked. Ready?

1. Salesforce — The Best Overall CRM Software in 2023

Salesforce is a feature-packed CRM software trusted by more than 150,000 businesses worldwide, both big and small. It has virtually all the functionalities you’d want from a top CRM software, including multiple integrations, automation, and more.

One of our favorite things about Salesforce is that it integrates with your Gmail and Outlook accounts. This way, all your emails will directly reflect on your Salesforce account, and you’ll be able to manage the interactions from one place.

If your team isn’t replying properly to new leads, you’ll also be able to check that without leaving Salesforce. To simplify lead management, Salesforce lets you automatically route them to the right sales rep.

For example, if you have a group of sales reps specializing in your primary target audience, you need to send qualified leads, warm leads, and cold cases to the right rep.

With Salesforce, you can make full use of the specialist’s skills to convert difficult leads while letting the less experienced ones handle the easy leads to give your sales an extra boost.

Speaking of lead management, Salesforce makes garnering new leads easier with its web-to-lead capture formula. Let the leads register directly from your clients, and Salesforce will automatically sync their data in your CRM database, ditching the need for manual entry.

Pricing

The Salesforce Essentials plan starts at $25/user/month and includes features like case management, service console apps, telephony integration, and more.

To access premium features like service contracts, entitlements, and the web services API, you can upgrade to the Enterprise or Unlimited plan.

Unsure if Salesforce is the right fit for your business? Try it out for free for 14 days with the trial. No risk in seeing if Salesforce meets your needs.

2. Pipedrive — The Best CRM Software for Email Campaigns and Marketing Processes

Pipedrive is a CRM tool for salespeople designed by salespeople, which naturally makes it easy to use and a top choice among sales leaders.

Pipedrive’s best-selling feature is its visual pipeline, which gives you real-time insight into how well each of your deals is performing.

Instead of wasting time over long email threads with your team asking for updates, you can check live deal updates for every lead by logging into the Pipedrive dashboard.

You can also make changes in the pipeline by simply dragging and rearranging the deal. No other platform gives you such tremendous control over your leads.

In addition to this, Pipedrive helps you nurture your leads by setting sales activity reminders. For example, you can set a reminder to follow up with leads who haven’t responded to your last email in a few days.

A small step such as a timely follow-up will make a massive impact on your final conversion rate and, thereby, revenue.

If you believe in storing old conversations with your clients no matter how old they get, Pipedrive will be your friend. Whether it’s calls, emails, or meeting notes, Pipedrive keeps a thorough record of all your lead and client interactions.

Do you want to evaluate the quality of communication between your sales rep and clients or look for facts to mitigate conflicts? With Pipedrive, you can easily dig into old conversations anytime you need.

Pricing

Pipedrive’s Essential plan starts at $9.90/user/month (billed annually) and includes features like lead and deal management, customizable pipelines, lead inbox, and deal rotting.

However, there are limits on the number of open deals (3,000) and custom field limits (30) on the Essential plan. If you need more open deals and custom fields or want additional features like:

• Customizable email templates
• Group emailing
• PDF format support

Then you can upgrade to a premium plan like the Professional plan.

Find out if Pipedrive is the right fit for your business with the 14-day free trial. No credit card information is needed. No hassle.

3. Zoho CRM — The Best CRM for Small Businesses With a Mobile App for On-the-Go Use

Zoho CRM’s lead and customer management service stands out with its superior automation and personalization features. If you want to get it done fast and effectively, Zoho CRM is the way to go.

Zoho simplifies deal management by pointing out where each deal stands at any given moment. You can create separate columns for each stage, such as proposal review, decision-making, or negotiation, and Zoho will help you categorize each deal accordingly.

An organized view of the deals in hand not only simplifies task delegation but also helps you plan your resource allocation and next course of action better.

To help you focus on the right deals at the right time, Zoho CRM offers a prediction score for each deal. This score tells you how likely a lead is to sign the deal.

If a lead is highly likely to turn into a paying customer, you can keep them a top priority and keep at it while saving resources on dead leads. Besides this, Zoho’s workflow automation feature is a godsend for teams looking to cut back on unnecessary work.

Here’s how it works — you create a new rule for, say, cold-pitch. Add a condition that if a prospect replies to your cold pitch within 3 days, you immediately send an automated email that explains your service better.

Add a second condition that if they don’t respond, you send an automated follow-up. This way, the initial conversation with your prospects is automated, and your team only has to step in when it’s clear that a lead is interested in becoming a customer — saves you both time and resources.

Pricing

Zoho CRM’s Standard plan costs $14/user/month and includes features like predefined reports and dashboards, email templates, and custom fields, making it suitable for small to mid-size businesses.

Suppose you want to access advanced features like:

• Assignment rules
• Email parsers
• Data entry wizards
• Segmentation

And other premium security, marketing automation, and product customization features. In that case, you can upgrade to the Enterprise or Ultimate plan.

With the 15-day free trial, you can try Zoho CRM risk-free and gauge if it’s worth your time and money.

4. Monday Sales CRM — Best Free CRM App With Marketing Automation With Personalized Email Templates

Monday.com is the best free CRM software for small businesses and startups. Even on the free forever plan, it lets you bring 2 sales reps on board and manage up to 1,000 contacts.

You also get web forms that directly capture the leads and update their information in your database — no more wasting time manually entering information.

Our favorite Monday.com feature is email tracking. Just syncing your email with the CRM platform isn’t enough. To take faster action and know your leads better, you need email tracking to monitor their every move.

Know who opens your emails, who engage with the content, and who simply ignores it. This way, you’ll be able to gauge the interest level of the leads who didn’t respond in the first round.

The best way to get more responses to your emails is to keep them personal. However, as a business, you might not have the time to add a personal touch to every email. That’s why Monday.com offers email templates that auto-fill data from your CRM records.

Speaking of client interaction, it’s not just their interest that you can evaluate with Monday.com. With Monday.com’s activity tracking feature, you can also monitor your team’s performance over email and calls — check your sales team’s capacity and whether they adhere to your company’s communication protocols.

Pricing

Monday.com offers a free forever plan that allows up to 2 users and 1,000 contacts, making it a good option for individuals and small businesses.

However, the free plan is limited in features, and understandably so. For a more comprehensive and affordable CRM solution, we recommend Monday.com’s Basic CRM plan. It includes unlimited customizable pipelines, contacts, boards, and free viewers.

Get started with Monday.com today without any financial commitment, thanks to its generous 14-day free trial.

5. Zendesk Sell — The Best CRM System to Boost Your Sales Team’s Productivity

Zendesk Sell is designed to help you grow your business by giving you more clarity through organized sales pipelines and automated workflows.

For starters, it integrates with Google Calendar so that all your appointments can be managed from your CRM tool’s dashboard and is visible to both you and your team.

This way, you can check your schedule for the day or even delegate tasks more efficiently based on your team members’ availability without switching between multiple platforms.

If you want to give your team the flexibility to work on the go, Zendesk Sell’s mobile version is the only solution you’ll need. The best part is that the Zendesk Sell mobile app also supports offline access.

No more excuses for the WiFi not working or an unstable connection — your team can work just as efficiently offline. Plus, to make your team’s life easier, Zendesk Sell gives each user 2 to 10GB of cloud storage space, depending on the plan you’re on.

This benefits you in two ways:

Pricing

Zendesk Sell’s Suite Team plan starts at $49/agent/month. It includes an industry-leading ticketing system, a unified agent workspace, 50 AI-powered automated answers, and over 1,000 apps and integrations.

If you need premium features like SLA management, customizable and shareable dashboards, and up to 500 AI-powered automated answers, you can upgrade to a premium Zendesk Sell plan.

Try Zendesk Sell risk-free today with the lengthy 30-day free trial. Find out if it matches your needs without risking a cent.

6. HubSpot — Leading Customer Relationship Management Tool to Shorten Sales Cycle and Manage Sales Pipelines

HubSpot’s biggest USP is its massive line of business tools that takes care of marketing, CMS, operations, and more, along with CRM.

So if you’re using the same parent platform for all your business needs, data transfer and inter-communication between each department become a breeze.

Speaking of its CRM tool, finding and nurturing new prospects has never been easier. With HubSpot, you no longer have to spend hours researching your prospects.

The HubSpot CRM tool will automatically fill in the information about your contacts from its massive database of 20 million businesses.

You just need to enter the corporate email address of your prospect, and HubSpot will take care of the rest. The less time you spend researching your prospects, the more time you’ll have to build connections.

It also helps you predict expected revenue from each deal so that you can plan your resources and strategies accordingly.

A clear comparison between the sales forecast and actual sales also helps you identify where your team is falling short and how you can match your performance with the ultimate goal.

If you don’t want to keep your leads waiting, you can add a live chatbot on your website with the help of HubSpot CRM. You can customize the chat theme to match your business’s overall theme, and each conversation is stored for your sales rep so that they can build a better connection with the prospects.

Pricing

HubSpot offers a free plan with plenty of features like a shared inbox, help desk automation, custom surveys, and more.

If you want access to premium features and better support, you can sign up for a paid HubSpot CRM plan starting at $45/month (billed annually). This plan includes everything you need to run a small, medium, or large corporation smoothly, including:

• Ad management
• Email reply tracking
• 5,000 email templates, and
• Support for up to 5 currencies

Besides a free plan, you can also utilize HubSpot’s free live demo to see whether the tool works exactly like it says it does. Try it today. No risk. No hassle.

7. Freshsales — Free CRM Software to Create a Personalized Sales Experience for Your Leads

Freshsales understands how crucial it is to have shorter cycles to grow your revenue. That’s why it helps you personalize your lead engagements and close more deals as quickly as possible.

For starters, its web tracker helps you understand the visitor’s intent. If someone is going through your pricing and feature list, they’re obviously interested in your service and might be worth pursuing.

On the other hand, if a visitor spends just a few seconds on your website before bouncing to another site, they’re not worth the chase unless they inquire about your services first.

This simple feature helps you segregate interested prospects from thousands of normal visitors, so you don’t waste your precious time and resources on dead leads.

Like HubSpot, Freshsales also lets you add an AI-powered chatbot to your website to handle prospect queries. This way, your leads don’t have to wait for your team to respond, and at the same time, your team doesn’t have to waste their time answering the same standard questions that a bot can handle.

To shorten the sales cycle, Freshsales quickly tells you which lead is more likely to close a deal through its Contact Scoring feature that monitors your interactions with a lead to gauge their interest level.

Close the deal with eager leads quicker, move closer to your quarterly goals, and make space for newer leads.

Pricing

Freshsales, like HubSpot, offers a free forever plan that includes contact and account management, 24/5 support, a mobile app for on-the-go usage, and more.

However, the free plan doesn’t include Freshsales’s bot, Freddy. To access Freddy and other powerful tools like a visual sales pipeline, AI-powered contact scoring, and sales sequences, you can upgrade to Freshsales’s Growth plan, which costs $15/user/month.

Find out if Freshsales CRM is your cup of tea risk-free with the generous 21-day free trial. No credit card information is needed. No risk of losing any money.

8. Maximizer CRM — Leading CRM App for Detailed Reports on Customer Interactions

Maximizer CRM is perhaps the only tool that not only helps you manage your leads better but also helps you supervise your sales team and help them be a little better every day.

For starters, it lets you track the individual sales activity of each representative. You can track their calls, messages, and emails to check how they interact with the leads.

This gives you a chance to identify who your business’s real assets are and who could use a little help. With Maximizer CRM, you can also coach the weaker sales rep.

The platform provides adequate feedback and communication channels for the internal team, making it easier for sales leaders to mentor new reps. Along with acquiring new customers, Maximizer CRM also helps you keep new ones.

With its Customer Health Analysis feature, you can check which clients are undoubtedly loyal to your company and who are at risk of leaving — consistent monitoring of your customer interaction will obviously give that away.

With a fair warning in advance, you can work on your relationship with customers at risk and possibly change their minds and keep them loyal to your business.

Maximizer’s detailed customer insight about who’s buying what from you and spending how much helps you prioritize your clients revenue-wise. After all, the bigger the client is, the more attention they deserve plus need.

Pricing

Maximizer CRM has two plans: the cheapest plan allows for up to 10,000 contacts and a 100Gb database size.

The Sales Leader Edition plan, which is the costlier plan, includes the same number of contacts and database size but also comes with a Kanban Board for tracking and monitoring sales teams, as well as data visualizations for detailed insights into company productivity and revenue.

Maximizer CRM provides a free live demo of its tool, allowing you to find out if the tool will be right for your business. There’s no financial commitment, so try it today.

9. Less Annoying CRM — A Popular Beginner-Friendly CRM App for Small and Mid-Sized Businesses

Less Annoying CRM, as the name suggests, is easy to use, primarily because of its one-plan pricing, but still comes packed with features — the perfect combination every business, especially small businesses with simple needs, requires to succeed.

For starters, Less Annoying CRM lets you create your own dashboard and customer field from scratch. Add as many columns and rows as you need, or change the fields on the lead profile.

You can experiment any way you want, Less Annoying CRM is equipped to support you through all the phases. Along with the CRM features, you get a cohesive virtual workplace where each employee can see what the other is working on.

This helps you maintain transparency among your team and also delegate work more easily to the truly available employees. At the same time, you can also use this feature to check what deals are currently handled by each sales rep or if they are working all their hours.

After all, you don’t want anyone to sit idle while the entire team struggles to handle the load. Besides all this, Less Annoying CRM’s customer support is a standout.

Available from 9 AM to 5 PM on weekdays, you can contact them anytime through email or over a call. Not only will they get back to you and fix the problem, but they’ll do so at no extra cost.

Pricing

Less Annoying CRM is the most straightforwardly priced CRM software. It offers just a single plan at $15/user/month with no hidden fees or contracts whatsoever.

The best part? You get a generous 30-day free trial to decide risk-free whether to commit to it long-term or not. Try it today.

10. Oracle NetSuite — Quality CRM App for Automating Multiple Business Processes

Oracle NetSuite CRM centralizes all your communications. Whether with your leads, existing customers, employees, suppliers, or partners, you can manage every key company relationship from one platform.

One of our favorite things about Oracle NetSuite is that it helps you identify which leads are likely to convert, helping you redirect your focus and resources to the right people.

It tracks your customer’s interactions and activity and compares it with their predefined set of buyer-readiness conditions to check if it’s the right time for your sales team to approach them or not.

If you invest your time in a prospect just casually browsing and checking your service, it’ll all go in vain. On top of this, to appease existing customers, NetSuite offers a brilliant case management feature.

Instead of submitting the complaints manually to your team, NetSuite lets your users submit them online. From the same portal, they can also directly check the real-time status of their queries instead of bombarding you with emails asking for an update.

It’s a win-win for clients as well as your team. Plus, NetSuite also provides personalized insights for each customer management department. For example, customer service can check overall customer satisfaction.

The marketing department can check the impressions, engagement, and conversion on each campaign, and the sales department can check the success of each sales stage and total revenue versus forecasted revenue.

These individual insights help each department get direct feedback on their performance at each stage instead of deriving generalized performance feedback from the final result.

Pricing

Oracle NetSuite provides a custom plan for every user to give them exactly what they need. The subscription starts at $99, but the total price is arrived at by adding the following:

Contact NetSuite’s team, design your own plan, and get a custom quote; plus, you can test out the live demo to judge the tool’s suitability for your business.

Top CRM Software | Top 10 Compared

Running short on time? Here’s a table highlighting the key differences between the top 10 CRM tools to help you reach a decision quicker.

CRM Tools FAQs