Best CRM Software For Startups in 2023

What is CRM Software?

A CRM software helps startup businesses store all their contacts in one place, monitor every step in the sales process, and build long-term relationships with their customers. These days, you can find many free CRM software available on the market.

But what exactly is CRM?

CRM stands for customer relationship management.

CRM helps a startup deepen its relationships with customers, partners, and suppliers. This is especially important because, without good stakeholder relationships, it’s almost impossible for a startup to grow.

In fact, it's one of the most important tools for startups because it helps them achieve so much.

Features of CRM Software

Here are some of the features found in CRM software for startups:

• Sales pipeline management
• Dashboards and reports
• Email integration
• Marketing automation
• Lead management

These features ensure that everyone in your startup has access to the latest customer data. This allows your sales team to deliver the best customer experience. One study estimates that 65% of consumers become long-term customers of a brand with a good customer experience.

Additionally, the right CRM Software USA can help your team avoid problems like miscommunication between sales and marketing teams, limited access to data, and missed opportunities.

 Data estimates that using one CRM system can increase a company's cross-sell and up-sell revenue by 39%.

More importantly, don't mess with multiple juggle tools.

Benefits of using CRM for startups

A CRM will help your startup organize contacts, find out who your customers are, generate reports, save time and make money tips.

When it comes to choosing a CRM, you should expect simplicity. Fortunately, there are now many CRMs that require minimal training, with intuitive UX, overall usability, and easy access to information. A well-designed user interface ensures that your entire team is actually using it.

Your CRM should include features like sales automation, sales forecasting, and marketing campaign management.

Contact data management is a crucial benefit of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) that allows businesses to store and organize customer information in a centralized database. This helps businesses to have a better understanding of their customers, which can be used to improve customer service and increase sales.

The customization features allow you to tailor the CRM software to your specific business needs. The ability to change contact and opportunity fields and more is very useful when you're working in new territory.

As a new company, you probably don't have your own IT department either, so make sure you that your chosen CRM is backed by a great customer support team that will simplify your product learning curve, answer your nagging questions, and conveniently resolve

technical issues.

Then the price to consider: an obvious decision factor for startups; You want something that stays within your budget, with tiered pricing plans that gradually increase (in other words, no costly surprises).

BEST CRM SOFTWARE OF 2023

1. Salesmate 

Salesmate is an ideal CRM and customer journey platform that enables you to automate your sales, marketing, and customer support processes.

You can also use it as a Google CRM platform that seamlessly integrates with your favourite G Suite apps, like Gmail, in seconds and improves your team’s productivity. 

Salesmate's marketing automation feature is highly advanced and allows you to automate various processes such as lead scoring, sending email blasts, conducting NPS surveys, A/B testing, and much more!

Main features:

• It offers powerful features such as sales automation and marketing automation.
• Meeting scheduler, live chat, and chat journeys help in improved customer engagement.
• Smart web forms help in capturing quality leads.
• Built-in calling and power dialer help increase calling productivity.
• Provides a centralized database for managing all contacts.
• It offers a 360-degree view of your entire sales pipeline.
• Salesmate integrates with over 700 apps.

Pros:

• It offers various features, including Sales Automation, Marketing Automation, sales pipeline management, 
• Contact management, built-in calling, live chat, meeting scheduler, and insightful sales reports. So, by utilizing these features, you can improve your team's overall productivity and measure your growth.
• If you have assigned any goals to your team members, you can easily track them using sales goals tracking and stay updated on the progress.
• Salesmate’s drag-and-drop email builder lets you create captivating emails to engage better with your prospects.
• Its user-friendly interface makes it easy to use for sales teams of all sizes. So, you need to have the technical expertise to use Salesmate.
• It integrates with over 700 applications, making syncing and managing your data easy.
• It offers a free trial and a flexible pricing structure that can be customized to fit your budget.
• The Salesmate team is responsive and provides excellent customer support.
• Overall, Salesmate helps you manage your business process from a single platform, so you don't have to switch back and forth between multiple platforms, saving you time.

Cons:

Salesmate's automation journeys are beneficial, however it might seem a bit complex at first as it provides many different trigger options.

Pricing

1. Starter - $12 per user/ month
2. Growth - $24 per user/ month
3. Boost - $40 per user/ month
4. Enterprise - Custom pricing

2. HubSpot

It is a free CRM for startup companies. It also has many helpful sales tools for startups that help teams manage their pipeline more effectively.

Key features

• Get detailed insight into your entire sales pipeline with visual dashboards and lead scoring.
• Connect with customers with the scheduling tool, live chat, or email
• Manage documents and build a library of helpful content for your entire team
• Integrates with Microsoft Dynamic, Slack, Jira, and more

Pros

• It’s truly an all-in-one platform
• It includes free CRM software
• It’s easy to use 
• use it as a CMS for content marketing 

 Cons

•  It Gets Expensive — Quickly
•  Their Contracts Aren’t Flexible
• The Templates are Hard to Modify
• Reporting is Limited

Pricing

HubSpot CRM is completely free

3. Agile

Agile CRM is an all-in-one CRM solution with some project management features. Agile CRM lets you assign tasks to team members, track email campaigns, and gamify your sales process.

Let's see how Agile CRM can help you improve your sales strategy:

Main features

• Track phases and milestones of the project in your sales quotes
• Contact customers with click-to-call and voicemail automation
• Automate
  appointments, invitations and follow-ups
• Sort Tasks by priority and due date , owner or status

Agile Pros:

• Affordable prices
• Contact management made easy
• One of the best email marketing tools:
• Easy-to-use setting and management interface even for beginners
• Automated sales pipeline system makes it easier to close deals

Agile Cons:

• Only one integration feature is available for Starter package
• Buggy email capabilities
• Third-party integration issues
• Limited third party integrations
• Limited service automation features
• Lack of reporting

Pricing

$9.99 per user per month

4. Salesforce

Salesforce helps teams manage every stage of the sales cycle. With this CRM platform, you can track top-performing team members, create quotes and more. Exceptional user experiences are the benchmark across industries and a must for businesses today. With Salesforce Development Services, you can address all critical business requirements as quickly as possible. 

Let's see if this sales CRM will transform your sales reps into a force to be reckoned with:

Key Features

• Track your team's performance with dashboards
• A social feed feature that allows teams to collaborate on client projects
• Leads automatically assign the right team member
• Get information from popular social networks like Facebook and Twitter without leaving the app

Pros:

• Salesforce is designed to not only provide a significant number of features out of the box, but is also highly customizable.
• Salesforce runs on the cloud, meaning that it operates out of a colocation data center available to users over the internet. Cloud-native software provides more flexibility and accessibility to users
• Salesforce provides multiple avenues for users and organisations to get help, skill up, and learn from each other

Cons:

• With such a flexible, customizable platform, it can be easy to build in too much customization, and some integrations come with limitations
• Physical locations without the internet or a stable connection, accessing resources is challenging.
• Although Salesforce provides a dedicated support team, automated technical services can fail to resolve issues quickly, and it can take time to reach a person to provide the answers you need. This delayed support can impact organizational efficiency.

Pricing

$25 per user, per month

5. Zoho

Zoho CRM allows you to set long-term Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and monitor sales rep performance via dashboards. This way, you can encourage employees to maintain a long-term relationship with the customer even after deals have been closed.

Key Features

• Automate tasks like emailing customers , keep up with leads and more
• Create customer portals to keep your customers engaged
• Respond to emails from Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook in
• The app can help in easy communication with the VoIP phone call feature.
•  Get a summary of all sales activity with dashboards

Pros:

• Solid email marketing & automation features
• Integrates seamlessly with other Zoho products
• Form builder app available (paid)
• Comprehensive reporting

Cons:

• Requires a lot of customization to get started.
• Limited customer support.
• Forms aren't optimized for conversions.
• Zoho offers a lot of features but the depth of their functionality proves limited as your demands increase.

Pricing

Starting 57$ per user.

6. SugarCRM

SugarCRM is a CRM platform with marketing automation, email templates, and AI-powered predictive analytics.

Key features

• Get an overview of customer interactions so sales reps know when and how to contact them
•  Help customers get the answers they need through the self-service portal.
• Identify problem areas before they become problems with case tracking and dashboards
• Create custom
• landing pages, emails and conversion forms

Pros:

• Contract & Document Organization.
• Workflow.
• Account Management.

Cons:

• Upgrades are not smooth for us, it requires a lot of IT support. Our SugarCRM instance is self-hosted.
• Speed, at times it runs really slow.
• More customization for setting users up, preload dashboards and dashlets etc.

Pricing

SugarCRM costs start at $52 per user per month and can be as high as $1,000 per month.

7. Salesflare

Salesflare is an intuitive CRM system that startups can use to automate data entry providers, better track their leads, and communicate with customers as a team.

Key Features

• Salesflare connects to your inbox, calendar and mobile phone to manage your emails, meetings and VoIP phone calls with customers record for you
• Automatically creates contacts for people you are in contact with and collects information about them from email signatures and publicly available information
• Organize your deals in a visual drag-and-drop pipeline mode and get automatic reminders when to follow up
• Send automated email flows, sequences of divulgation and email campaigns right from your CRM off
• Track your customers in your emails s and on your website
• Salesflare integrates seamlessly with your landline service, Gmail, Office 365, Zapier, and more

Pros:

• Has a drag-and-drop visual pipeline
• Integrates with a wide selection of third-party software
• Comprehensive engagement tracking tools
•  In-depth real-time team and revenue insights

Cons:

• Lacks built-in dialer
• Limited customization options
• No free plan
• Does not offer phone support

Pricing

$25 per user, per month.

8. ClickUp

ClickUp is one of the world's top-rated productivity and startup management software, used by teams in small and large businesses.

ClickUp allows you to use tags to organize your Organize accounts geographically, view your customers with Map View and automatically assign tasks to each stage of your sales pipeline.

Plus, with ClickUp's free Forever plan, your startup can invest the money you spent on software would have your

business!

ClickUp pros

• Powerful free CRM for startups that allows you unlimited users
• Easy to use interface with Online and offline modes
• Make sure your team knows which tasks to work on first with task dependencies
• Give clients accurate project timeframes with time estimates
• Create onboarding documents, wikis, SOPs , Quotes and more with ClickUp Docs
• Collaborate with your teammates using the ClickUp chat view
• Ensure your
  customer service team is tackling tasks in the right order with task priorities
• Manage client deadlines and meetings the way you want sync with Google Calendar
• Integrates with all major Google apps including Google Drive, Hangouts Chats, Google Assistant and more
• Create tasks, notes and documents with our powerful iOS and Android mobile apps
• Supports Apple, Windows and Linux platforms

ClickUp Limitations

• There is no table view in the mobile app (yet).
• Check out the ClickUp roadmap to see how we're fixing these minor issues.
• And don't forget to check out the catalogue of cool features this free CRM project management tool has in store for you.

Pricing

$0 to $19 per member per month, billed annually

9. iSmartRecruit - Your smart hiring partner

iSmartRecruit aims to revolutionise the traditional recruitment process by providing AI-based automation in the recruitment software for corporate HRs, mass recruiters, staffing and recruiting agencies.

It is a recruiting automation software that provides an AI-based Applicant tracking system (ATS) and Candidate/Client Relationship Management software (CRMS) which automate the recruitment cycle by eliminating manual and repetitive tasks in the hiring process.

Key features

• Online skills assessment tools
• Recruitment Chatbot - 24x7 support
• Social Recruiting - easy and efficient job advertising
• AI-based candidate matching
• Resume parsing and management system
• Video Interview tools
• Candidate onboarding
• Various hiring analytics - make data-driven hiring decisions

Pros

• Automation in the hiring process
• Eliminating manual and repetitive tasks in the recruitment cycle
• Reduce the time-to-hire and cost-to-hire
• Help discover the top-notch candidates
• Provide positive candidate experience

Limitations

• No free plan
• Requires a little time for the customisation
• Limited third-party integration

Pricing

• Start-Up plan: $29 per user per month
• Professional Plan: $59 per user per month ( best recommended)
• Enterprise plan: for big teams (15+ users) looking to grow their business. Contact their sales team.

Note: They accept Quarterly or Yearly payments only.

Apptivo CRM

1. Sales automation and marketing automation for improved efficiency
2. Engage customers effectively with features like meeting schedulers, live chat, and chat journeys.
3. Capture high-quality leads with smart web forms.
4. Increase calling productivity with built-in calling and a power dialer.
5. Centralized contact database for seamless contact management.
6. Gain a comprehensive 360-degree view of your sales pipeline.
7. Integration with over 700 apps for easy data syncing and management.

Pros:

• Empower your team's productivity and track progress with features like sales goal tracking and insightful sales reports.
• Create captivating emails using Apptivo CRM's drag-and-drop email builder.
• User-friendly interface is suitable for sales teams of all sizes.
• Flexible pricing structure with customizable plans to fit your budget.
• Responsive customer support from the Apptivo CRM team.
• Save time by managing your business processes on a single platform.

Cons:

• The automation journeys in Apptivo CRM may appear complex initially due to the wide range of trigger options.

Pricing:

• Lite: $10 per user/month
• Premium: $15 per user/month
• Enterprise: $25 per user/month

Frequent ask questions

What is the best CRM for a startup business?

1.  ClickUp
2. Hubspot
3. Agile CRM
4. Salesforce
5. Zoho CRM

Which CRM software is best?

ClickUp is the best CRM for a startup business.

Do startups need CRM?

The CRM market is booming and is expected to reach $128.97 billion by 2028. For startups, a good CRM as a centralized system for managing customer relationships and sales processes is especially important when they have big dreams on tight budgets.

Conclusion

 It can be quite a challenge to keep your startup company running when you have to deal with a storm of tasks on your own. But remember, startups value knowledge about everything and nothing is more valuable than customer data.

Luckily, free CRM tools for startups can save you time and other resources and manage customer relationships with ease. This allows you to shift your focus from administrative tasks to growing your business.

But for your startup to run smoothly over the long term, you need the best startup CRM tool.