Choosing the right CRM software is vital to maximizing sales and building customer relationships. From collecting lead information to managing customer data, the best CRM software can help you meet your goals. In this guide, I ranked and reviewed the 7 best CRM software, along with my top 5 choices, so you can pick the best one.
Salesforce
If you want to sell smarter and close more deals, Salesforce is the #1 CRM to consider.
Nutshell
Nutshell automates your sales process and shows you where to make business improvements.
Monday
Customize your workflows to track all aspects of the sales cycle, from lead gen to post-sale support.
Pipedrive
A sales-focused CRM that uses AI to automate repetitive tasks and manage leads and sales.
Hubspot
With its fully-featured marketing suite, Hubspot is a CRM software that requires little introduction.
In an industry where 72% of companies use CRM to build better customer relationships and track interactions, the right CRM software will pay off.
Customer relationship management (CRM)Â software aims to nurture these customer relationships across your channels, ensuring an excellent customer journey and experience and ultimately guiding customers down the sales funnel.
With specialized CRMs (such as CRMs for startups and small businesses), you can find CRM software that will work for your business and budget.
CRM tools help manage and improve company interaction within a centralized database by leveraging email marketing, lead generation, and marketing automation.
Best Enterprise CRM Software.
Arwa’s Take
Do you want a selling tool that your team can use out of the box? Salesforce is my #1 recommendation for anything (and everything) CRM-related. If you want to get more leads, close more sales and build relationships with your audience, Salesforce gets my top recommendation.
Salesforce is one of the most famous names on this list and has more than a million users worldwide.
It’s a cloud-based CRM software that caters to all business branches, including sales, service, marketing, analytics, and more.
Learn more about this platform in this in-depth Salesforce CRM review.
Key Features:
- Opportunity Management – You can close more deals by identifying the perfect opportunities with the ‘opportunity management’ module.
- Contact Management – With this module, you can track parameters like customer history, communications, and social media mentions.
- Sales Performance Management – Set sales goals and update targets for the best sales performance.
- Visual Workflow – You can drag, drop, share, and track files and updates using this.
- First Feed Feature – This feature lets you see what you want to see (based on your settings).
User Experience:
A visual dashboard gives you all the information and numbers you need to see at a glance while still providing the ability to dive deeply into the details with just a few clicks.
Salesforce’s interface is very user-friendly and easy to navigate.
The layout is clean and organized, making it simple to find what you’re looking for.
You can use various apps on tablets, mobile phones, and even smart watches, making it easy to stay connected to your data no matter where you are.
Pricing Plans:
Best for Team Adoption.
Arwa’s Take
Nutshell is a CRM that allows teams to access critical customer information quickly and easily. Whether it’s contact details, call notes or email conversations, Nutshell provides a single source of truth for every customer interaction.
Nutshell automates your sales process, saving time on tasks and ensuring reps know what to do at every moment.
Nutshell’s easy-to-use reports give you insight into your business, so you can measure performance and pinpoint areas for improvement.
These reports provide valuable customer data, metrics, and trends, allowing you to make better-informed decisions on how best to move forward with your sales process.
Another great feature of Nutshell is its email templates and automated personal email sequences.
These features help you stay at the top of your buyers’ inboxes with a fraction of the effort.
Finally, Nutshell also offers simple web forms designed to collect leads directly from your website while tracking their effectiveness.
This makes capturing leads easier and converting them into paying customers without manually entering all the data.
Key Features:
- Find every contact, customer, and conversation, no matter where they come from.
- Automate your sales process with automated pipelines and personalized email sequences.
- View and track your leads in one convenient place, so you can quickly see who’s responded or where they are in the sales cycle.
- Do all your email outreach from one tool – no need to switch between multiple apps.
- Report on your performance with easy-to-use information that will show you how well your sales process is doing.
- Sync up all of your lead data across multiple platforms for maximum efficiency
User Experience:
A personalized, quick start checklist when you sign up helps you get Nutshell up and running in no time.
The dashboard offers an easy-to-understand overview of your customer data, team performance, and sales process so you can stay on top of everything quickly and efficiently.
You can also meet with Nutshell’s CRM experts to ensure that you’re maximizing your platform use and getting the most value out of it.
Pricing Plans:
Nutshell offers these pricing plans:
- Nutshell: $16 per user per month
- Nutshell Pro: $42 per user per month
- Nutshell Limitless: $4,975/month
The Limitless plan offers unlimited seats of Nutshell Pro.
There is also a 14-day free trial available to get you started.
Arwa’s Take
Want to get your hands on the best CRM overall? With custom sales pipelines created based on your specifications, the ability to set up workflows and make the best out of your data, and many other functions, I declare Monday.com as the best CRM system overall.
Monday.com allows you to customize your workflows to track all the aspects of the sales cycle, from lead generation to post-sale support.
If you want to tailor anything related to your sales pipeline, workflow, or customer data, Monday.com is your best bet.
A complete view of your customers and sales data is accessible with Monday.com, and it’s an excellent choice for companies that want to monitor their sales process closely.
In addition, you can visualize everything at a glance with the Monday.com dashboard, making it easy to spot any potential bottlenecks or problems in your sales cycle.
Key Features:
- Have everything laid out in front of you so that you can quickly spot any potential problems in your sales cycle
- Easily customizable to track all aspects of the sales process
- Great for companies that want to monitor their sales pipeline and performance closely
- While on the go, you can also access Monday.com through its mobile app
- Integrate Monday.com with other apps and tools you use
Read more about Monday.com’s full CRM features.
User Experience:
Graphs, pie charts, bar charts, and tables display information quickly.
The interface is clean and straightforward, making it easy to find what you’re looking for.
You can also click on any element in the interface to get more information about it.
With the ability to know which salesperson is working on which deals, you can quickly assign tasks and follow up with customers.
Arwa’s Take
Pipedrive is the best overall CRM software that I have found. With AI powering repetitive tasks and managing leads and sales, Pipedrive is a tool that is designed just right for salespeople.
Pipedrive is a sales-focused CRM that uses AI to automate repetitive tasks and manage leads and sales. They currently support over 90,000 customers, and over $24 billion in deals have passed through their platform.
Key Features:
- Lead Management – Track leads and sales from forms, chatbots, and more on a 24/7 basis.
- Visual Sales Pipelines – You can organize your pipeline and create custom stages (hot, warm, cold) by rep or team member.
- Communication Tracking – A complete contact history tracks calls, emails, chats, and more, allowing you to set your schedule in real-time.
- Mobile Apps – You can use Pipedrive from your mobile device and integrate your smartphone with other sales apps to increase sales.
- Reports & Analytics – Get more insights with data-driven reports and dashboards.
User Experience:
Pipedrive is another excellent platform when it comes to user experience.Â
With dashboards that range from simple to complex, you can get as much or as little information as you want.
Look at your deals started, deals lost, activities, and even how much revenue you’ve generated, all in one place.
With an easy-to-understand left-hand side menu, you can also look at various reports that show you how your sales are doing.
Arwa’s Take
Hubspot CRM is great for those that want to take their marketing and sales to the next level. It offers many features and allows you to track your performance over time. If you’re looking for a CRM that can help you close more deals and boost your productivity, Hubspot is worth considering.
HubSpot CRMÂ is a full-featured marketing suite, with its CRM software being its most popular offering.
HubSpot CRM is great for sales professionals due to its features and time-saving tools. It’s also an option for marketing teams to capture, track, and grow new leads within a database.
They offer a 100% free version of their software, with the ability to upgrade and get access to their entire suite of marketing tools.
Key Features:
- Email and Lead Nurturing – You can send free, personalized emails and track your results with built-in analytics reports.
- Contact Organization and Management – You can connect your email inbox to their CRM and automatically sync and organize your contacts in one place.
- Over 300 Integrations – Easily connect your existing tech stack to get more functionality from the tools you’re already paying for.
- Live Chat and Chatbots – Help customers faster with support tickets, productivity tools, and instant chat capabilities.
- Sales Pipeline Data – Sales teams can view their entire pipeline with insights into sales activity and individual performance.
User Experience:
Understand where every lead is at using the visual pipeline and quickly add or update deals and contacts with just a few clicks.
It’s also easy to nurture your leads with personalized emails and move deals through your pipeline faster.
Pricing Plans:
HubSpot CRM has a free plan that offers a lot of great features to start with. You can then choose to upgrade to one of their paid plans:
- Starter ($40/month):Â All features of the free plan, plus additional forms, up to 50 email list segmentations, $1k in ad management, ten reporting dashboards, and limited conversational bots.
- Professional ($800/month):Â All features of free and starter, plus 2,000 email list segmentations, $10k in ad management, 25 reporting dashboards, and full chatbot features. This plan offers additional features like phone support, content strategies, an SSL certificate, and a blog.
- Enterprise ($3,200/month):Â All features outlined above (with higher-tier options), user roles, event-based segmentation, predictive lead scoring, API calls, multi-touch revenue attribution, webhooks, and more.
Freshworks CRMÂ (formerly Freshsales) is an AI-based CRM for lead scoring, email activity, email capture, etc. One of its most prominent features is that it provides a 360-degree view of your business.
Key Features:
- Lead Management – Provides solutions to convert prospective leads into customers.
- Deal Management – Gives you a thorough picture of where the deal is in the sales funnel. It also helps you manage and organize every step in the funnel and maximize your chances of conversion.
- Tracking and Lead Scoring – With an in-built AI feature, you can rank and score leads and identify the ones most likely to make a purchase.
- Auto Lead Assignment – The CRM allows handpicked leads to select salespeople automatically.
- Smartforms (web-to-lead) – When a person fills up the web form on your website, they automatically become a lead and are added to your database.
User Experience:
If you want to see your whole customer journey mapped out in front of you, then Freshworks CRM is a great option.
With the ability to see every customer interaction with your company, you can quickly resolve any issues they may have.
You can also see all the various integrations that happen along the journey, making it easy to track down any problems.
Salesmate is excellent for those that want to increase revenue and connections in their business.
Salesmate is a cloud-based sales performance customer management software that empowers your sales team and customers with simple, personal, and productive experiences.
Providing a personal touch to your prospects ensure they get the right information at the right time.
Key Features:
- Sales sequences allow you to create automated playbooks for any sales cycle stage.
- Save time, increase focus, and stay on track by having your team’s activities in one central hub.
- You can nurture leads without lifting a finger with sales automation features like email sequences, drip campaigns, and workflows.
- Using a lead assignment system makes it easy to funnel contacts to the right salespeople for quick action.
- A report library that’s easy to navigate and understand allows you to run reports on sales-related data.
User Experience:
You can create a dashboard that is customized to your needs and preferences, making it easy to see the information that is most important to you.
The interface is clean and straightforward, making it simple to find what you’re looking for.
With a focus on the visual, Salesmate makes it easy to see your sales process and progress.
What is CRM Software?
Customer relationship management (CRM)Â software is an online tool that helps organizations manage a sales pipeline from lead generation to closing sales.
CRMs help companies access, organize, and make sense of customer data to generate more sales.
CRM collects information from various channels like social media, email campaigns, live chat, phone calls, personal interaction, feedback forms, and more.
It further leverages data analytics to analyze the customer’s buying history, patterns, and needs.
The aim is to enhance the customer experience and satisfaction, turning leads into customers, then nurturing and upselling that relationship.
CRM has been around for a long time (earlier in paper form), but the benefits of customer relationship management systems became apparent after widespread digitalization.
CRM systems link various departments, including sales, marketing, HR, customer service, IT, business intelligence (BI), and finance.
Furthermore, data is readily accessible by any employee in real time, which empowers teams to make quick, data-driven decisions.
CRM solutions have connected interdepartmental teams and increased sales while removing business silos.
Summary.
There are a lot of CRM tools on the market, and all of them have unique features and benefits.
Overall, I recommend you get started with Pipedrive or Freshworks CRM for your customer relationship management CRM software, as they are the best options.
However, you know your business better than anyone, and it’s for you to decide what it needs.
Look at the value you’re getting at a definite price point and the outcome you’re looking at.
Look at cloud vs. on-premise deployment, features and functionality, third-party integrations, ease of use, pricing plans, and more. Study all the facets before choosing the perfect CRM software for your business.
Which CRM software are you planning to use for your business?
Let me know in the comments below.
Further Reading on AdamEnfroy.com: Check out my other reviews of the marketing automation platforms and project management software to use this year.
And if you’re an enterprise business, read my reviews of the best ERP software or the best ecommerce platforms to run your online business.
Finally, check out this ERP vs. CRM comparison guide that covers the similarities and differences between these two primary enterprise tools.
