For any startup or a well-established business, customers are considered the backbone of any business, and without them, there is no business. And every business, including startups, needs a CRM i.e., Customer Relationship Management tool in order to maintain strong relationships with their clients, manage & store contacts as well as streamline processes.
As we can see that the CRM software industry has grown at a rapid pace in recent years, now there are so many options available to choose from! But not every Customer relationship management software solution is going to be the perfect fit for your organization. And some of the options might even be disfavor according to your workflows, budget, scalability, etc.
Choosing the right CRM software for your business might come with a major headache sometimes. But you do not have to worry about that anymore as we are here to help you avoid that difficulty by providing a list of the best CRM software for startups in 2023. Go through the list to find the ideal fit for your business today! But first, let's read about what CRM software exactly is, what are the things to consider while choosing, and its advantages!
What Is A CRM (Customer Relationship Management)?
CRM stands for — Customer Relationship Management, and as the name says, CRM software can be defined as an important tool that helps in storing, managing, tracking, and organizing the relationships with your customers. It supports you to store customer information like user behavior, purchase records, how long a client has been associated with your company, sales interactions, etc. All these data can be utilized to optimize the sales and marketing processes and enhance your customer service in your business.
CRM software functions by keeping track of the behavior & actions of your existing or potential customers via your email marketing campaigns, company's website, social media platforms, etc. And it further guides the consumer through the sales funnel by delivering a triggered email or making a sales representative alert of the consumer's interest.
Note: CRM software is utilized to store, manage as well as organize data based on your business relationships with your clients.
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What Are The Things To Look For In A CRM Tool?
Now, before we jump straight to the list of best CRM tools for startups, we have curated a list of key criteria that you need to look for while selecting a CRM tool! It is actually easy to get confused but this specific list will help you narrow down your options and keep your search in the right direction.
- Features
Make a list of the features that are nice to obtain and the ones that are your needs. And then, only focus on the latter part of it.
- Price
There are a lot of CRM software solutions that might go beyond your budget. But you need to decide on your budget and then, according to that, start your in-depth search for your CRM tool.
- Automation
You need to focus on a customer relationship management tool that actually automates the small, precise, or trivial details and enables you & your sales team to concentrate on the things that really matter.
- Integrations
Find a customer relationship management tool that has the capability to integrate with several other technologies as well as applications for further utilization.
- Scalability
You should invest in CRM software that scales along with your business.
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What Are The Benefits Of A CRM Tool?
A CRM solution can be utilized in numerous ways and also provide a lot of benefits to your business. Some of them are mentioned below:
a) Improved Customer Service
Advanced and modern CRM tools have too many functions, but the software was developed with the motive of improving relationships with customers and that is still counted as one of the major benefits it has to offer. A CRM helps in managing all your business contacts and collects valuable customer data such as purchase records, sales interactions, demographics, etc and it makes it easy to access for anyone in the company.
b) Boosts Sales
CRM software helps in streamlining your sales processes, create a robust sales pipeline, automate significant tasks, and evaluate all your sales data in just one centralized place. This helps in boosting your productivity and sales. It also helps you to determine a step-by-step sales procedure that your sales team can depend on every single time.
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c) Details Analytics
Having a lot of data about your consumers is good but you should know what it actually means and how to utilize it. Generally, CRM software has built-in analytic abilities in order to contextualize data, and break it into few actionable items and readily understood metrics. There are metrics such as bounce rates, click-through rates, and demographic data which help you to evaluate the success of marketing campaigns as well as optimize accordingly.
d) Automated Sales Reports & Documents
It will become easy for your sales team to assemble & organize data about your existing and potential customers utilizing the dashboard of your CRM software and reporting features, which enables your employees to automate and manage their sales pipelines & processes.
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Here's A List Of Top CRM Solutions For Startups To Look For In 2023
1) edge CRM
edge CRM is actually an AI-driven customer relationship management software that can help you to improve your sales efficiency as well as productivity. With edge CRM, you will be able to develop amazing business-customer relationships in the long run. It comes with a lot of key features such as case management, cloud computing, CRM analytics, document management, email templates, expense tracking & management, attendance management, data privacy, lead qualifiers, accounting, sales dashboards & sales reports, and beyond.
In addition, edge CRM has an in-built Smart PDF module, which entitles users to create invoices, documents, performance, proposals, and more quickly. It also provides a 360-degree view of all the open/closed tasks for every client or prospect to the sales managers. The AI-based platform facilitates businesses to indicate customer trends and utilize real-time insights to stimulate business growth as well as employee productivity.
2) Pipedrive
Pipedrive is actually a SaaS CRM tool that has some cool features as it lets you know when your current customer is around you. With this amazing feature, you can arbitrarily run into customers and maintain healthy relationships with them.
The key features of this CRM tool are it helps in monitoring the progress of your sales team through custom reports & visual dashboards, creating email templates or selecting from readily available templates to accelerate communications with customers, set goals & objectives in order to track progress and view your daily chores in a calendar view.
3) Zoho CRM
Implementing Zoho CRM can help you to set long-term KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and monitor the performance of your sales representatives through dashboards. In this manner, you can motivate your sales teams in order to maintain a long-term customer relationship even after the deals are closed.
The key features of Zoho CRM are that it helps in creating customer portals to keep your clients engaged, automating tasks such as following up with leads, sending emails to your consumers & beyond, getting an overview of all your sales activities, and responding to emails.
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4) Salesforce
Speaking of Salesforce, it is effective in managing every single stage of the sales cycle. With this amazing CRM tool, you can focus on top-performing sales team members, develop quotes, and much more. The key features of Salesforce are that it allows you to track the performance of your sales team with the help of dashboards, obtains valuable insights from social media platforms, automatically assigns leads to the ideal team member, and comes with a social feed feature where your team members can collaborate on various client's projects.
5) HubSpot CRM
When it comes to HubSpot CRM, it is actually a free CRM for startup businesses. Isn't it amazing? Of course, it is! It also comes up with a lot of helpful sales tools for startup companies that support sales teams to manage their sales pipeline in a more effective way. The key features of this particular CRM system are that it gets a comprehensive insight into your whole sales pipeline accompanied by lead scoring & visual dashboards, connects with clients through email, live chat, or scheduling tools, it has the capability to integrate with Jira, Slack, Microsoft Dynamic & more, and helps in managing reports and creates a set of valuable content for your team.
6) Agile CRM
Agile CRM is a one-stop CRM solution with some excellent project management functions. Implementing Agile CRM can help you with assigning tasks to your team members, keeping track of your email marketing campaigns, and streamlining your sales process.
The key features of Agile CRM are that it enables you to keep good track of all the states and project milestones in the sales deals, sort out tasks on the basis of status, owner, priority, due date, etc., automate follow-ups, scheduling, and invitations, and connects with customers by utilizing the one-click calling feature & voicemail automation.
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7) SugarCRM
SugarCRM system comes with AI-driven predictive analytics, email templates, and marketing automation. Its key features are that it helps in creating custom conversion forms, landing pages, and emails as well, identifying the problematic areas even before they become a huge issue with dashboards and case tracking, and gives an overview of client interactions so that the sales representatives understand when and how to reach out to the clients and lastly, help consumers to attain the answers they require via the self-service portal.
Get Started With Edge CRM For Your Startup Today
It might be a super challenging task to keep your startup company afloat when there are a lot of tasks to be managed on your own! You must remember one thing that startups value knowledge above anything else and it's an unsaid thing that there is nothing more valuable than customer data for any business.
Fortunately, with the above CRM tools, you can save a lot of time and other resources while managing your customer relationships with utmost ease. This way, you can shift your priority & focus from admin tasks to expanding your company.
And in order to ensure that your startup runs smoothly in the long run, you need to get your has in the best CRM tool! With edge CRM, you can have the ability to visualize your client projects, plan out your sales team's work capacity and set & keep track of your progress toward your goals and objectives.
Get started with Edge CRM by requesting a free demo today!