The 3 best CRMs for small businesses
CRMs for small businesses and solopreneurs to grow and scale.
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A Customer Relationship Management system is important for any business wanting to nurture relationships and deliver a great customer experience. A CRM does more than that however, it can improve organisation and efficiency as to how work gets done within your business.
We’ve talked before about the importance of CRMs in a business in more detail. Today let’s focus on what CRM you should consider for your business.
According to Zoho, there are more than 600 CRMs in the market. No wonder it's hard to choose one. Not to mention, switching CRMs down the track can be a real headache—so it's important to get one that can scale with your business from the get-go.
To help with that, here are our top 3 picks for the best CRMs for small businesses and solopreneurs. We’ve worked with and tested these CRMs ourselves and with clients across different industries:
Hubspot CRM
Hubspot provides a powerful CRM platform that's both intuitive and easy to use. It's long-held as a popular choice for many businesses of all sizes. Given the company's long history and line-up of products, you can confidently scale your business on Hubspot CRM without ever having to leave its environment.
What you’ll like about Hubspot:
It’s a reliable company and product all round.
It's packed with features and customisation.
Hubspot CRM has a great lifetime free plan.
Automatic email syncing in and out of the CRM, as well as email forwarding and logging.
The mobile app has a 'Today' view which displays timely tasks and appointments etc.
Source: Hubspot
What you might not like:
Hubspot has a steeper set-up and learning curve, because of all its many features and customisation options.
To get the most out of Hubspot, you have to use all of their tools. And that can become a problem on many fronts, including the next point:
When you upgrade to their Sales and Marketing Pro Plans, it gets expensive - fast. And you must commit to 6 or 12-month lock-in contracts.
Limited customer support on the free plan. But there are plenty of blogs and resources out there to find answers to questions yourself.
Keap
Right off the bat, we love Keap’s mission to “help serious entrepreneurs grow without the chaos” because that sums up what a good CRM should do.
Previously known as InfusionSoft, Keap is our go-to for small businesses who want a simple, easy-to-use CRM that combines email marketing, automation and booking tools all in one place.
What you’ll like about Keap:
As for the user experience overall, we think it’s hands-down a winner (Keap Lite & Pro - Max is a different beast that follows the old InfusionSoft model). Keap is so easy and intuitive to use.
You'll most likely cancel your Calendly, Mailchimp and Zapier subscription, as Keap has these features built into their platform.
It’s really easy to build in automation like follow up emails or tasks.
They have a great mobile app too with client caller ID built-in.
Source: Keap
What you might not like:
Keap only starts with 500 contacts in its first tier, which isn’t that generous, compared to other CRMs.
For Australian businesses: Keap is billed in USD$, and you’ll likely want to get the Pro plan with a few users. This means you’ll easily jump to $200/month and above. That can be a bit of a stretch for some small businesses.
Because Keap is kept simple, you sometimes encounter moments of missing features, even if it’s just something small, like exporting a chronological PDF record of a clients activity log.
We recommend starting with a Free Trial of Keap to experience it for yourself.
Bigin
Zoho is often associated with big corporate software solutions, however, many don't know about their new small business CRM called Bigin, launched in May of 2020. Moving right past the name (which we still don’t know what it means), Bigin is a simple, pipeline-centric CRM that's built and priced for the needs of small and micro-businesses.
What you’ll like about Bigin:
It's clean, simple and fast.
It's well-priced for small and growing businesses.
It has a brilliant mobile app that makes it easy to check deals, tasks and activities. The advanced notification customisation options are like nothing else we've ever seen.
Great widgets on Mac and iOS devices.
The ‘Signals’ feature gives you timely and insightful notifications, such as when a client opened your email or a client call was missed.
You can always upgrade to the full Zoho CRM in the future.
Source: Zoho
What you might not like:
The prominent 'Companies' tab and the lack of some customisation around the 'Products' feature both signal that Bigin is more aimed at B2B's selling physical products, rather than service-based B2C businesses.
It still retains some jargon here and there. eg. 'Records' are Contacts.
Bigin doesn't yet have a 'home' view, rather it starts with the pipeline and you can navigate over to the Dashboard view, which has some limitations itself. There's lots of room for improvement around the visual UI and dashboard/UX customisation.
Written by Lachlan Nicolson.
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Enjoy this Insight? Need help implementing a CRM in your business? Or have questions about Hubspot, Bigin or Keap? Reach out to our team at hello@leaderguide.com.au
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