8 Best CRM For Small Business Owners & Agencies

Regardless of industry, businesses can't survive without customers. Hence, small businesses and agencies that want to be successful must find an effective way to build and maintain customer relationships.

Implementing CRM systems in your organization is one of the best ways to improve your customer relationships. If you are in search of the best CRM software for small business owners, your search has ended here.

Whether it is generating new leads, retaining existing customers, or fixing your broken sales process, running the entire show alone can be pretty overwhelming. This is where the best CRM systems for small business owners and agencies come into play. Read this article to get the list of top best CRM software for small business owners and agencies. Let's start.

Table Of Contents:

• 8 Best CRM For Small Business Owners & Agencies
• How To Choose The Best CRM Software For Your Small Business Or Agency?
• Final Thoughts: Selecting The Best CRM For Small Businesses & Agencies In 2022
• FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)

You can directly jump to a section of your choice or keep scrolling.

8 Best CRM For Small Business Owners & Agencies

Here's a list of the top 8 best CRM softwares for small business owners and agencies along with their key features, pros, cons and pricing.

1. Statusbrew: Best Social CRM
2. Nimble: Best For Fostering Customer Relationships
3. monday.com: Best For Flexibility And Ability To Scale
4. ClickUp: Best Free CRM For Small Businesses
5. HubSpot: Best CRM Tool For Sales Empowerment
6. ZohoCRM: Best For Customization
7. Freshsales: Best Easy-to-use CRM
8. Pipedrive: Best Value-for-money CRM

1. Statusbrew: Best Social CRM

Statusbrew is a social CRM platform that centralizes all your social media customer relationships in a single and easy-to-use platform to drive results for your business. It helps you complete your social marketing funnel, segment inbound leads, and get the most out of your social campaigns.

Statusbrew CRM logs the contact information of your leads and customers from social in an accessible directory.

Statusbrew syncs the information of all contacts whose conversation is received on your connected social profile and adds the conversation to a unified inbox. Statusbrew CRM pulls the social contact and profile details of the contacts and displays them in the contact sidebar, on the right side of the dashboard. Every threaded conversation has its contact sidebar.

Key Features

Clicking on the user's name will take you directly to the user's social profile if the lead has arrived from your connected Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter profiles.

You can even view the conversation history with your customer, and you can directly jump to any conversation by clicking on it.

The Contact Sidebar even provides you a space to add internal notes regarding the contact for your team member by mentioning them.

You can even add tags to your contacts from the Contact Sidebar, making it easier to segment contacts based on their current stage in the marketing or sales funnel.

In fact, you can even add relevant details for your contacts like name, email, and phone number.

Pricing

• Lite: $69 per month
• Standard: $129 per month
• Premium: $229 per month
• Enterprise: Custom pricing

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2. Nimble: Best For Fostering Customer Relationships

Nimble is a CRM tool that unifies data from contacts, conversations, calendars, and apps. It makes it easy for users to organize contacts and activities automatically into segmented lists, allowing them to send group messages and set follow-up tasks. Other features include personalized templates for group emails, tracking, analytics, reporting, pipeline management, and power search.

Key Features

• A one-stop solution for organizing and managing contacts, building and maintaining customer relationships, setting reminders, finding opportunities and meeting goals
• Simple and client-friendly
• Set reminders, and extend Nimble by integrating them with more tools
• Assign tasks to your team members with improved sales pipeline tracking and reporting

Pros

• It provides a chrome plugin that automatically aggregates social accounts. This reduces manual efforts to a great extent.
• It offers a smart app that helps to collect customer information and stores it in its database.
• It provides a centralized place to collect emails, CRM-related data, and calendars.
• It provides facilities for the creation of lists and group messages.

Cons

• It doesn't have a good email editor.
• It has a poor deal management system.
• It lacks Slack integration.
• It comes with only one pipeline.

Pricing

• Nimble Business: $19 per user per month

3. monday.com: Best For Flexibility And Ability To Scale

While monday.com actually has its roots in being a project management tool, it is used quite well as a way to manage the sales pipeline by many small businesses, landing it here in our list of handpicked best CRM for small business owners. It is a visual-first tool. It offers great features to track potential leads and clients, manage your sales pipeline, and visualize your entire sales process, all while being super intuitive to use.

Key Features

• Session management
• Advanced account permissions
• Allows automating 100000 actions per month
• It provides an audit log
• HIPAA Compliance
• Allows you to build and customize the dashboard according to your requirements for gaining insights
• Provides a clear overview of sales, processes, performance, etc., in one dashboard
• Allows you to automate repetitive tasks
• Allows for automatically setting due date notifications, automatic reminders, and assigning new tasks to teammates

Pros

• It is an all-in-one and easy-to-use CRM solution to use.
• It has advanced search capabilities.
• It provides a chart view, time tracking, and private board features.
• It can be customized to fit your sales workflow.

Cons

• Toggling between the project views is quite tricky

Pricing

• Individual: Free
• Basic: $8 per seat per month
• Standard: $10 per seat per month
• Pro: $16 per seat per month
• Enterprise: Custom pricing

4. ClickUp: Best Free CRM For Small Businesses

ClickUp is a project management suite and CRM tool for small businesses with features for visually managing customer relationships, email, account tracking, and more.

You can see your client's status at a glance with flexible views, including lists, boards, and more. You can use custom dashboards to reduce bottlenecks, analyze customer data, and set custom status workflows for account pipelines.

ClickUp includes:

• Features for calculating contract values and costs with formulas
• Using chats and comments to work with team members and clients
• Tracking orders with custom fields

ClickUp offers native integrations with G Suite, Dropbox, Slack, and many more tools, and several integrations through Zapier.

Key Features

• Provides unlimited custom roles, access to managed services, and single sign-on facilities
• ClickUp includes a feature of 'everything view.' This feature gives a bird's-eye view of all tasks across every level of the organization.
• Tasks are customizable along with providing the creation of nested subtasks and checklists
• Provides more than 15 powerful views
• Includes functionalities for automation, customer relationships, and several integrations

Pros

• Provides 100MB of storage even with a free plan
• Provides support for unlimited members and tasks
• Includes two-factor authentication and real-time chat

Cons

• It has a little more learning curve.

Pricing

• Free: Free
• Unlimited: $5 per member per month
• Business: $12 per member per month
• Business Plan: $19 per member per month
• Enterprise: Custom pricing

5. HubSpot: Best CRM Tool For Sales Empowerment

HubSpot is a great choice for small businesses that don't require all the frills. HubSpot centralizes contact lists, collects data from the internet to populate information about prospects, and automatically logs interactions. HubSpot is the ideal CRM tool for a contact-focused business that doesn't have a huge requirement.

Key Features

• Helps to synchronize the marketing department with the sales department
• Helps to manage sales pipelines with total visibility
• Provides contact website activity tracking
• Logs every activity automatically so users can see all the contact information in one place
• Provides hundreds of App Marketplace integrations
• Provides email automation
• Provides ad management and retargeting features
• Comes with a reporting dashboard
• Offers document repository

Pros

• It provides an excellent feature for searching for companies.
• It comes with integrations for Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Calendar.
• It can continue to work in the background without disturbing the other software and tools.
• It helps to capture the feedback from clients.
• It keeps all the client records in one place.

Cons

• Its free version does not include all the features.
• Through HubSpot, you cannot send emails to multiple companies at the same time.

Pricing

• Starter: $45 per month
• Professional: $450 per month
• Enterprise: $12000 per month

6. ZohoCRM: Best For Customization

ZohoCRM is a sales CRM tool allowing UI customization for faster business implementation and higher user adoption. It enables small businesses to convert leads and engage with customers by providing multiple channels for communication: email, phone, chat, social media, web forms, self-service portals, and more. It provides real-time notifications, automates repetitive tasks, and generates reports using analytics for performance tracking.

Key Features

• It is an omnichannel platform to connect with your customers across different channels.
• It provides sales automation tools to manage leads, accounts, contacts, and deals through workflows and macros.
• Customizable dashboards and reports with several options to compare and derive insights from your data
• Provides Zia, an AI-Powered sales assistant, to help you detect anomalies, identify email sentiments, enrich data, predict sales outcomes, and the best time to contact someone
• Internal chat feature along with forums, groups, and notes to facilitate effective team collaboration
• Mobile CRM app to record data, connect with customers, and schedule tasks

Pros

• Quick and easy onboarding
• Advanced security features include encryption, IP restrictions, audit logs, and two-factor authentication with customizable user access
• Mobile CRM app to stay in touch with your customers anytime, anywhere
• 24-hour support for premium users

Cons

• The free plan is limited to 3 users.

Pricing

• Free: Forever free up to 3 Users
• Standard: $14 per user per month
• Professional: $23 per user per month
• Enterprise: $40 per user per month
• Ultimate: $52 per user per month

7. Freshsales: Best Easy-to-use CRM

Freshsales is a CRM for sales and marketing teams providing a comprehensive view of your customers. It is also among one the best free CRM for small businesses, with features for customizable contact lifecycle stages, contact and account management, as well as built-in chat, email, and phone.

It helps companies find more opportunities to attract the best leads with a landing page builder, AI-powered chatbots, custom email campaigns, and tracking page visits and activities. It captures customer interactions and provides deal insights, dynamic forecasting, and campaign analytics to improve customer engagement and sales conversions.

Key Features

• Event tracking
• Create custom reports
• Automated and personalized emails
• Respond to leads and analyze dashboards on the go via the mobile app
• Built-in phone, chat, and email features

Pros

• Helps improve client management and acquisition
• Tracks customer interactions and adds information about them from various channels
• Helps sales teams better understand what their target audience likes in order to sell products and services to them accordingly

Cons

• Fewer third-party integrations
• Long loading time
• Poor customer support
• Difficult to use

Pricing

• Freel: Free for 1 user
• Growth: $18 per user per month
• Pro: $47 per user per month
• Enterprise: $83 per user per month

8. Pipedrive: Best Value-for-money CRM

Pipedrive is a sales CRM and pipeline management software helping small businesses to grow their revenue. It is easy to set up and use. It allows users to focus on specific actions to make sales and uses analytics to depict measurable results.

Pipedrive includes features to drive sales activities more efficiently for small businesses. It allows users to track calls, emails, and contact history and automate repetitive admin tasks. It even offers contact and calendar sync, integrations, mobile apps, and compliance with privacy and security standards.

Key Features

• Provides setting goals, contact history, API, and mobile app features
• Has a good sales pipeline and email integration
• Includes map integration, email tracking, data import, and export facilities

Pros

• It has a simple UI.
• It has multiple pipelines and email integration of apps.

Cons

• Lacks the ability to create highly customized reports
• Not possible to track the customer responses on apps

Pricing

• Essential: $9 per user per month
• Advanced: $19 per user per month
• Professional: $39 per user per month
• Enterprise: $59 per user per month

How To Choose The Best CRM Software For Your Small Business Or Agency?

Consider Here are the six factors you should consider as you decide on the right CRM tool for your small business or agency:

1. Your Goals: Different CRM systems excel at different features. Hence, it’s important to understand what problem(s) or goal you are trying to achieve in your organization with a CRM to make the right selection.

2. User Experience: All CRM systems help to gather customer data and use it to improve business relationships and sales. However, they go about it in different ways by prioritizing certain features and functionality, which is reflected in the user experience.

3. Integrations: Before you invest in a CRM solution, ensure it can work in tandem with the software and apps you use in your organization. This will help in better collaboration and the collection of customer data efficiently.

4. Your Budget: Enterprise-grade CRM solutions tend to have more bells and whistles. If you don’t need all the features, find a CRM solution that’s cost-effective.

5. Flexibility/Scalability: Your business might be small right now, but if you are planning to grow it over time, you should opt for a scalable CRM solution. As you choose the right CRM software, ask yourself: Will the solution grow with my business?

6. Reporting/Analytics: Keeping your sales goals and pain points in mind, look for a CRM solution that will give you the information and metrics you need to improve your workforce and your workflows.

Final Thoughts: Selecting The Best CRM For Small Businesses & Agencies In 2022

There we have it!

We hope this blog helps you discover the best CRM tool for your business. After which, you can start managing your leads, prospects, and customers and get to know them better to boost your conversions.

Grab a FREE demo with NO COMMITMENTS required of the Social CRM tool, Statusbrew to acquire leads from your social platforms!

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Statusbrew is an all-in-one social media management tool that supports Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and even Google My Business.

FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)

Here are some commonly asked questions about the best CRM systems for small businesses:

What is the easiest CRM to use for a small business?

Pipedrive is one of the easiest CRM to use for a small business that needs a strong set of basic CRM features but doesn't want all the fuss coming with a more robust system. It lets companies manage their contacts, leads, and deals in a clean and intuitive visual interface.

What is the best free CRM for a small business?

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The free HubSpot CRM plan is the best for a small business to fit most of their CRM requirements. It allows you to manage the sales process, assign and track leads, manage workflows, and record customer interactions across several channels in one place. It also has comprehensive email marketing and inbound marketing tools as well.

Is CRM suitable for small businesses?

Yes. CRM shows all customer touchpoints, provides insights into what they are looking for, and helps you engage with them, all within the same CRM platform.