When you start a company, you will have a handful of clients and customers. Managing their information, sales figures, and other essential information are extremely easy. But as you start to grow and your clients and customers increase exponentially, you create different departments and hire freelancers as per business requirements. In such dispersed scenario, information about new clients, sales report, and other valuable information become difficult to manage. That is when you need a CRM or Customer Relationship Management tool. There are hundreds of CRMs available in the market and you can end up purchasing some below the average CRMs. The following is a guide about the best CRMs for startups in 2018 to help you choose the best one that fulfills your requirements perfectly.

Major Benefits Of CRM –

Data Management – CRM helps you to organize all information at one place so that you can have a centralized system at work. No matter how fast and big you grow, your data management will never be sporadic. All the different departments can stay on the same page and work cohesively and concurrently.

Organized Growth – CRM helps you to grow in an organized way so that you can carry out servicing, marketing, and selling in a systematic way. You can serve customers better to gain their loyalty and increase satisfaction. You can resolve issues faster and take feedback to implement.

Sales Reporting – You can understand which team is doing what to achieve the targets. For example, you can check the email sent, phone call made, meetings done, deals signed and likewise and hence, you can be an efficient administrator.

Forecasting and Strategizing – CRMs generate various useful reports which are immensely helpful in forming better marketing strategies. There are some CRMs that provide forecast sales and margin reports.

Apart from these, there are various other benefits like customer segmentation, maximizing cross-selling, enhancing internal communication, understanding customer behaviors, improving customer services and revenues by reducing freelance jobs for data management.

Best CRMs For Startups –

All the following CRM tools have all the basic features and functionalities you are looking for like storing contacts and keeping track of activities. On top of them, they have some special features that make them shine over other existing CRMs.

  1. SalesForce –

SalesForce is the most popular CRM in the world. It is very easy to use and comes with various advanced features.  Those features will help you increase customer loyalty and satisfaction, increase leads and get deals done faster. You can do one-to-one communication with clients and team members, understand customer behaviors based on his activities and monitor progress from anywhere anytime. Its CRM is integrated with AI which is why it is so advanced and widely used. You can run your entire business on your smartphone through its app. The analytics and insights are top-notch for better strategizing and forecasting. It costs $75 per month for its Lightning Professional version.

  1. Zoho CRM –

Zoho CRM is very easy to use and it provides all the essential insights and analytics you need to manage your company smartly and efficiently. It can log in all the conversation over phone, email, social media, and in person so that you can search it later by the customer’s name. The reports are very detailed and you can understand various trends and segments easily. You can likely to close deals fasters by understanding the customer better.  It is one of the cheapest CRMs with the monthly pricing of $20 per month.

  1. Instantly –

It is a complete CRM which means you get everyone on one page. You can view anything and everything about the clients and employees like communication history, events, tasks, relationships, sales, projects, social media profiles. There also have mobile apps for seamless integration and you can perform all the tasks and review processes on the go. It automatically tracks and logs all communications and interactions which help in understanding customers and provide personalized recommendations. It also links social media profile accurately with the contracts from its vast database. It is free up to 2 users with limited features and priced at $49 per month for the professional edition.

  1. 4. Pipedrive CRM –

It is one of the emerging CRMs in the world currently. You can plan activities in advance and put them in the pipeline for execution. You can track everything from deals to conversations. It shows the deals in a visual format to make you understand the current status of the deal and likely outcomes. It is a perfect tool for smart working and better organization and efficient management. The most important feature is that you can customize everything easily to suit your need. The pricing is $24 per month for the Gold version. You can try out for free before choosing it.

  1. HubSpot CRM –

The pipeline feature helps you to track your deals and understand team performance. You can filter through contacts to pick out the high-quality leads based on various critical parameters. There are amazing email templates that you can edit and impress the potential and existing clients. You can check appointments, deals done or lost, track customer interactions automatically through various media like call, email, or meeting. The reason why it is the best CRM for startups in 2018 is that it is completely free for endless users with unlimited storage and insights. The only constraint is that you can have up to 1 million contacts.

It is time to say goodbye to manual data handling and offering freelance jobs for hiring data operators. All of these five CRMs are best in their own ways and you can select any one of them based on your budget and requirements. It is better to place a CRM tool from the very beginning so that you can concentrate your energy in interaction with new potential clients and analyzing the existing ones and forming marketing strategies rather than getting lost in data management.

 

Kitty Gupta
Latest posts by Kitty Gupta (see all)