One of the best investments a small business owner can make is in people–both employees and customers. And you can easily serve your people with simple customer relationship management (CRM) software.
The vast majority of companies have systems to handle data about product management. However, plenty of data and analysis is out there and received on the daily basis about customers, which is an extremely important factor.
But before everything, what is a CRM exactly, what can you expect of a free CRM software, and how do you pick the perfect one?
We are here to help you. At ProfitBooks, we evaluated tons of CRM systems and settled for one.
Keep reading for everything you need to know about how CRM systems can help and how you can choose the right CRM for you.
The top CRM system software features a marketing and customer-centric approach. In simple language, a CRM gathers customer interactions across all channels in one place. A centralized source for managing all this data helps businesses improve customer experience, satisfaction, retention, and service.
Why You Need a CRM System?
Simply said, CRM allows businesses of all sizes to drive growth and profits. CRM becomes a link between businesses and their customers, in turn, creates honesty, improves relationships, and customer retention.
There are various benefits of a CRM system such as:
Optimize Customer Interactions
CRM boosts customer satisfaction by clarifying and conducting many of the more complicated customer interaction processes. CRM is a single stop for the management of all your contacts. It aggregates lead and customer information to build profiles of everyone you interact with.
Hence, you can easily access important information on customer behavior like purchase records and previous communications with them across different channels (social media, chat, email, etc.)
Make Data-driven Decisions
Making decisions is not only driven by data but is also empowered with a quick response time. You can improve your business workflows and operation with access to comprehensive insights in real-time.
This can help you enhance your current strategies and resolve ineffective ones. If there is a potential issue, you will be prepared with the software’s forecasting capability based on trends and patterns.
Better Analytics
Analytical CRM tools organize your available data in an intelligible and relevant manner as per your business needs. All your heaps of sales data, finance data, and marketing data flow into CRM to become visible metrics, with data warehousing and data mining there to make sense of everything.
The overall benefit is customer acquisition, customer retention, and better data management.
In general, businesses are shifting to a more remotely distributed culture, and teams are becoming more flexible from project to project. It makes sense to invest in a cloud-based tool that places all your work processes in one place, automates some of your tasks, and lets you access all your tasks and workflow processes on the fly.
Everyday working gets very simple with the ability to streamline workflow within a single app, freeing up resources for growth. CRM provides a clearly defined set of processes to close more deals, get tasks done on time, and reduce miscommunications.
Visibility of Revenue
A CRM software gives you insights to manage leads and opportunities that you can use to increase your sales, retain your loyal customers, and engage them with rewards, offers, and discounts.
It also helps you identify leads and nurture them. With marketing, campaign, sales, and customer reporting, you can monitor information, identify problems, show behavioral patterns, and find out how your overall return on investment is doing.
Features to Look For in The Best Free CRM Software
Affordable pricing
Money is an obvious make or breaks for small businesses and startups seeking CRM tools. When you do not have a lot of hands-on-deck, you want to make sure every dollar spent counts. If you are on a lean budget or on the fence about the usefulness of this kind of software, you may well want to start with a free CRM.
Automation and Integration
Automating repetitive tasks saves you a lot of time to focus on real, brain-engaging work. You should be looking for a system that has automation features like data entry, customer emails, and follow-ups, and updating information in real-time.
Customization
As a small business, you are probably doing things your way, rather than following a guidebook. Keeping that in mind, we suggest you look for customization features in the CRM software so that it can be tailored as per your business needs.
Being able to modify contact and opportunity fields, among other elements, is especially helpful if you are working in uncharted territory.
Ease of Use
If you are running a small business or lean startup, taking time out to learn a new, complex platform is not a thrilling idea.
For a small business, simplicity of the platform and ease of use should be deciding factors–a platform that requires minimal technical training is best, something that feels intuitive; that offers easy access and interpretation of information.
Social Media tools
Being able to keep track of multiple social media channels gives you full visibility on a public view about your business, your competitors, and overall industry trends.
Engage people one-on-one on the platforms they spend most of their time and demonstrate transparency by resolving issues out in the open; all to broaden your brand awareness and win more customers.
Top Free CRM Software
With the market demand in the last decade, there is a wide range of SaaS CRM options that deliver real value to small businesses nowadays. To help you choose, here is a run-down of the most popular free CRM software for small businesses.
1. Fresh Sales
Freshworks 360 customer engagement suite has its CRM tool named Freshsales. It is relatively simple, effective, and certainly a few hundred times better than running the back end of your business with a bunch of Excel spreadsheets.
The platform is built to help you scale your business, monitor deals, chop down mundane tasks, run sales email campaigns, boost sales productivity, and create efficiencies through data centralization. You can set custom organizational parameters as well. A built-in phone module offers auto-dialing, call recording, and call routing features.
Some software companies create products with the latest technology such as AI but then lose sight of the user experience, making it difficult to operate, set up, and navigate.
Freshsales is not one of those companies. The CRM is extremely user-friendly so that anyone can immediately start using it (even the advanced features).
The process of sorting and filtering tasks to focus on key contacts is less intuitive than it could be. Users report that Freshsales customer support occasionally takes a while to resolve issues.
What is available in the free version?
Freshsales provides a 21-day free trial to everyone.
2. Insightly
It gives you a pretty good bang for your limited budget, with contacts records and project management features all accessible within an interactive and clean user interface. Easy video tutorials are available that explain features in a simple manner, which eases the learning curve and implementation time.
Insightly is a full-stack CRM offering customer interaction management, lead routing, task automation, and sales pipeline tools. It works on the basic principle of ‘relationship linking’ which is a complex web interaction of your company and customers.
Part and parcel to this is ‘record linking,’ or creating vivid, fleshed-out portraits of all the contacts in your business universe by nabbing cross-channel data and seeing every aspect of interactions such as who knows who and when said interaction(s) took place.
Customizability is a major part of Insightly’s attraction. It also provides an inter-organizational security feature for specific modules, contact records, etc. by setting permissions by business role and/or department.
The platform has native integration with both G Suite and Microsoft 365, as well as Mailchimp, Slack, Dropbox, QuickBooks, and a ton of other apps. You can design your custom apps and visualizations to track things without any development knowledge; just drag and drop options into place.
What is available in the free version?
It is free for up to two users. Hence, you and your client can manage all your contacts.
3. Agile CRM
Agile CRM is a free all-in-one business platform with features like project management, contact view, reporting, support/service, and timeline features.
It has all those excellent customer support features which you need to keep churn down and boost the customer experience. Customer ticketing for support teams offers feedback forms, a helpdesk, and a knowledge database.
In Agile CRM deal-making over the phone lines or calls is super organized and effective due to the RingCentral and Twilio integrations available. This enhances the built-in telephony features ensuring conversation tracking and call recording.
With the online appointment calendar, you can easily automate upcoming voice calls and follow-ups. You can also attach documents in-app within the deal process, company and contact profiles, and emails.
What is available in the free version?
The free version limits 10 users.
4. Nimble
Nimble offers browser widgets or mobile app-based sales force automation for small and midsize businesses.
Its social CRM solution automatically populates a database of individual customer profiles and interaction histories from contact lists, email conversations, and social media activity across a range of frequently used platforms including LinkedIn.
In addition to customer experiences and pipeline management features such as deal tracking, alerts, and task management, this software also includes integration for listening across different social media to keep customer profiles updated.
This allows businesses to track which contacts are mentioning, following, or engaging with them, or who are celebrating milestones such as birthdays–which in turn creates valuable opportunities for informed outreach and follow-ups.
Users find a bit of a pain in keeping track of closed deals which you have to do one page at a time.
What is available in the free version?
It provides a 14 days free trial without any credit card information. There are discounts on annual packages.
5. Hubspot
HubSpot is hands down the best free CRM software for small businesses looking for a cost-effective CRM solution when they are getting started. It even offers a limited features plan which is forever free for their CRM, Marketing, Sales, and Service Hubs.
The CRM has a very simple UI, letting you explore your entire sales pipeline right on your dashboard. If you want more data (and who does not?), you can view all contact and sales activity, detailed reports, and performance on a user or team basis.
HubSpot has a mobile app for both iPhone and Android, email templates, real-time notifications, email tracking, scheduling, phone calls, and more.
It also integrates with more than 300 apps and services like WordPress, email marketing companies, lead generation software like OptinMonster, and on and on. HubSpot can be automated with emails like Gmail or Outlook to log activity, capturing every single email.
What is available in the free version?
It is totally free and you can have unlimited users. The free version’s features are many but basic, and you may eventually need to buy Sales Hub or one of HubSpot’s other add-on packages to boost the CRM’s capabilities.
6. Pipedrive
Pipedrive is a ridiculously user-friendly free CRM software that is designed to be simple and fast. You can keep track of your entire sales process and get an overview of it using the pipeline management features.
In addition to pipeline management with a clear and easy interface, you will also get email integration, sales reporting, and forecasting. With a simple mobile app, you can also access your CRM from anywhere.
There is no additional segmentation offered by Pipedrive, but it is easy enough to simplify identifying leads and maintaining relationships.
There is no internal emailing platform, so you will have to use Mailchimp integration for that. If you want more attention-getting, explicit deal notifications you will have to use Pipedrive’s Zapier integration, which has been described by users as somewhat complicated to set up.
What is available in the free version?
It offers free trials for all the plans and it offers as many users as you want.
7. Airtable
A non-full stack, lightweight CRM designed for limited aesthetics and easiness. The free CRM software version comes with unlimited flexible workbooks (that can contain different-yet-related spreadsheets) which are pretty useful.
Airtable’s workflow management database aims to re-invent the spreadsheet, allowing users to link data from different sets and interpret them easily. Importing and exporting data from. CSV is a cinch.
The fact that Airtable’s team puts a premium on creativity and personalization is probably the main reason for such love by people.
You can generate custom fields, and populate them with everything from attachments, run-on long-form text notes, checkboxes, links to records in other tables, and yes, even barcodes with the help of the drag-and-drop dashboard.
The result of these ‘souped-up spreadsheets’ is an all-in-one collaboration platform that provides general CRM functionality for people who might be allergic to most business tools (i.e., creatives, editorial teams, and the like). Hence, teams that require a mix of analytic, organizational, and communications features prefer it.
It is worth remembering that Airtable never set out to be a full-stack, conventional business CRM. This shows in its overall lightweight CRM features. More complicated work processes and task management will probably be too much for the platform to handle.
What is available in the free version?
The free version comes with all the essential features.
8. Flowlu
It is a CRM software well known for project management and knowledge base features. Build and store knowledge bases, keep track of project expenses and revenue, and handle finance and records management.
With Flowlu, you can quickly put together personalized invoices, auto-inserting CRM data into them and then sending them out in-app. You can follow a deal and estimate too. It helps in lead generation with custom web forms and invites customers to upcoming events and surveys.
It includes an Agile Scrum component in the free version that allows you to implement scrum strategies; like sprints on a visual task management board. Keep on top of issues and bug reports, track and prioritize product requirements, and streamline your workflows with flexible project tools.
What is available in the free version?
The free CRM software version gives you 1 TB of storage data but capped at 2 users.
9. SuiteCRM
SuiteCRM is an open-source customer relationship management (CRM) solution.
It provides users highly actionable insights on which to base critical business strategies, decisions, and actions. It is designed to boost your business sales with the help of different tools.
Your IT team will be very pleased with the custom layout, module, and relationship development tools the CRM vendor supplies. The ability to customize, and a large number of add-ons available on the web, allow SuiteCRM to deal with applications at pretty much all complexity levels. It also works on basically any OS imaginable.
A real-time dashboard in SuiteCRM syncs incoming data so that you can gain timely insights on open projects. You need some technical skills to customize the features.
What is available in the free version?
The free version does not include agents-based customer support (though you can ask questions on its community page).
10. Bitrix24
A well-developed, interactive CRM that handles sales pipeline and marketing campaigns, and helps your team collaborate effectively.
Create unlimited work groups and user groups, set up an HR help desk, and make internal communication seamless with a private social intranet. Centralize the storage of documents and make phone calls to any landline or mobile in-app. Click on an email to turn it into a task, calendar event, or discussion topic.
You can also use Bitrix 24 to build free websites, landing pages, and online stores that are automatically integrated with its CRM features. The app’s learning curve and app customization/configuration limitations may be issues for some small businesses.
What is available in the free CRM software version?
It has a Free starter business tool suite for up to 12 users.
11. Vtiger
This CRM works well for small businesses and can be deployed either on-premises or on the cloud. The free version also open-source includes sales insights, customer management, marketing automation, and customer support modules.
The Microsoft Outlook plug-in is the highlight in its open-source version, which allows users to sync their calendar and send emails with Outlook. Vtiger’s management dashboard is simple and helpful in tracking and managing leads online. You can customize the open-source version as per your needs too.
Vtiger has paid plans for managing sales, marketing, and help desk operations on the cloud.
What is available in the free version?
Open Source 7.2 will not allow the saving of web forms and certain fields in the email templates.
Paid CRM Systems
There are few really good CRM systems that don’t offer a free plan but packed with features.
For example, Salesflare focuses more on automation and helps you reduce the manual entry of data in CRM.
Paid CRM tools are known to offer better customer support and ongoing enhancements.
Bonus – Free Accounting Software
If you are looking for an easy-to-use and free accounting software, ProfitBooks is the most profitable solution. It is the fastest growing and amazingly simple to use accounting software for businesses. It lets you create detailed invoices, track expenses and payroll, and manage inventory without any accounting background.
With Profitbooks, you get the freedom to customize the application as per your needs. You can host it on your server, distribute it under your brand, and even resell it. It acts as your technology partner and provides the software under your brand name too.
In addition to core accounting, ProfitBooks offers many useful features not found in other traditional software. Some of them as listed below:
- Sales roles for your team
- Powerful Inventory Management Features
- Invoicing & Billing
- Expense Tracking
- Support for multiple currencies
- In-depth financial reporting
This software provides an extensive range of features in one place. This accounting software will make your work much easier and save you time.
Conclusion
Having the best CRM system for your small business will make your life so much easier. As a small business, you need all the tools and means to get that edge over your competitors.
Any of the platforms we have mentioned in this post will be a massive improvement from scribbled notes or digital files that offer no real way of using the information you spent time getting.
Put your small business in the right direction and be ahead of the pack; embrace innovation and get the most capable CRM.
Would you like to suggest any other software? Please feel free to add in the comments section below.
