The world's changed a lot in the last couple of years, and your business has likely changed with it. Communication, in particular, has seen massive upheavals with salesforces adopting hybrid work models and many customers still limiting their in-person interactions. Digital communications channels have replaced traditional ones, and there's no going back. Now more than ever, you need customer relationship management (CRM) systems.
Even if you already have a CRM in place, it may be time to upgrade to one that is better suited to the modern business style. A proper CRM goes beyond simple contact tracking by keeping a complete audit trail of every interaction your staff has with each customer. This can include everything from the customer's initial purchase, to support calls and what they were about, to a regional sales rep's notes from a meeting or call. A CRM system lets you track, analyze, and surface this data when it's needed, often including integrations with other software systems.
What Is CRM Software?
CRM software helps you track contacts and nurture them to build customer loyalty and repeat sales. A good CRM makes the information it gathers accessible to other business platforms via smart software integration. In this way, CRM becomes the epicenter of how you manage your customer's journey, from the first marketing touch, to a closed sale, and on to the next engagement.
Some very small businesses might try to use a spreadsheet to mimic what a CRM can do. However, this type of homebrewed solution delivers but a tiny subset of the features you'll get with a CRM, and it's cumbersome enough that you'll be frustrated once your customer list grows beyond 100 entries.
The best CRM solutions are not only easier to use than spreadsheets, but they also do more than just retain user and contact information. They also automate processes, such as dynamically creating calendar events, setting appointment reminders, prioritizing the sales pipeline, and automatically identifying new sales opportunities. They can even rank opportunities by likelihood of success. What makes that possible is integrating your other customer data so the CRM can access it, such as interactions with your help desk.
This information is a goldmine of opportunity. It lets you identify prospects for up-sell or cross-sell, convert existing customers to new products or services, target new marketing, or track invoices. The software is also a fail-safe because it prevents multiple salespeople from chasing the same prospect. Choosing the right CRM software dramatically improves your team's collaboration and productivity at the same time that it's increasing sales.
The Revenue Impact of AI Adoption in CRM
A key area for CRM growth in recent years has been the addition of artificial intelligence (AI) to leading CRM platforms. Vendors including Salesforce and Microsoft are building their own AI engines to enhance their CRM capabilities. Others are partnering with the likes of IBM's Watson to integrate AI's benefits into their offerings. These capabilities will significantly improve any CRM's ability to parse data and draw new insights from all kinds of customer interactions.
Know What You're Buying
Choosing a CRM is a significant investment. Knowing how your salespeople operate and having some idea of the features that can help them is where your pricing decision needs to start. Only by knowing what you need and then matching that up against the appropriate pricing tier are you going to get yourself the best deal. But there are gotchas beyond that, too.
For example, initial setup and training can eat up a chunk of the budget. So can upgrades and ongoing support. Integrating the software with existing systems might call for additional equipment. Does the CRM workflow mean the sales or customer service teams will need new PCs, smartphones, or tablets? These costs can quickly add up.
What's more, many CRM vendors are expanding their products into a variety of areas beyond customer relationships. They're moving towards managing the sales lifecycle end-to-end, with CRM representing the customer journey. The more expansive the tool, the more customization you'll need to make it work for you. That's why carefully evaluating these products is so important.
As with any piece of software, it's critical to take advantage of free trials when available. No matter how many reviews you read or demos you watch, you can't fully understand how CRM software works until you use it yourself. Be sure to have colleagues from different departments try out the software, too, so you can understand how successful it is in different situations.
Most vendors offer at least a 14-day trial (which is relatively short; 30 days is better). Some, including Apptivo CRM, Insightly CRM, and Zoho CRM offer free plans, albeit with limited features or users. These can either serve as a full-time solution for small companies or a long-term trial for larger companies.
Where CRM Fits Into Your Arsenal
One of the continuing trends we see with CRM solutions is consolidation into larger product ecosystems. Some products, like the venerable Zoho CRM, aren't just the flagship suite of solutions in their ecosystem, they set the template for the rest of the solutions the vendor offers. For example, Base CRM, once a notable standalone solution, was acquired by Zendesk and converted into Zendesk Sell, a more integrated solution that can feed into Zendesk's impressive array of customer support-driven SMB solutions.
Freshsales CRM similarly provides a lightweight and simple SMB-focused CRM solution while offering expanded functionality. This includes providing integrations, workflow automation, and sales intelligence features. Freshsales CRM also syncs nicely with Freshcaller and Freshdesk solutions, a distinct convenience for businesses using those solutions.
Other CRM solutions like Sales Creatio have refined their user interfaces to enable users to switch on specific business processes. Sales Creatio makes it possible to toggle between Marketing, Sales, and Service, functioning as a more dynamic control center for running various facets of CRM.
SMBs need to play the long game with their choice of CRM solutions. Growth-stage companies or businesses looking at expansion should start analyzing which integrations will make sense in the future.
Give Your Salespeople What They Need
The toughest part of making a good CRM choice is understanding what the product can do and what your salespeople actually need. Sales is a difficult and often fast-paced profession, which means your employees could actually feel burdened by the very tool you purchased to help them. That'll kill adoption rates, so you need to understand what they need before tossing more technology into the mix.
It's tempting to forgo this homework and simply pay for one of the big, all-inclusive CRM software packages just to have access to every feature. But that approach will almost certainly wind up costing you more in both time and money, while probably delivering less flexibility than you'd expect. That's because these large CRM software packages are often platforms rather than tools. The numerous features they advertise are the product of integrating with a host of third-party solution providers, not merely options you can turn on. Third-party integration means not only added licensing dollars but also new costs.
A better approach is to first understand how your employees will use the software. Think about what tools your team is currently using and what processes they follow. Figure out how those tasks map to the CRM software you're evaluating. Consider what some of the most common tasks are. For example, if a tool forces users to dig through menus and submenus every time they want to log a call or email, the tool will complicate their jobs instead of simplifying them. More and more CRM tools combine the email and sales experience into a single, smart inbox or centralized dashboard view to manage all or most daily communications and tasks without leaving the CRM tool.
The ways in which companies interact with customers are shifting rapidly. Most customers still expect to interact with you via email, but social media is fast becoming a game-changing technology for interacting with customers. Understand how your company interacts with customers over email and make sure your CRM software complements that relationship and doesn't hinder it. A fully optimized CRM should automatically capture data from email interactions, not force your employees to do that manually.
Once you've looked at requirements from the sales team's perspective, flip it around and think about your customer. Maybe even run an online survey or focus group. What is their best sales experience? Once you know that, you can tailor your CRM to fit.
High-Quality Data Is Crucial
Data quality should be a key focus of that tailoring process. You'll need to pay attention to customer information that originates inside the CRM and the supporting data imported from other systems, such as finance or service desk tickets. Ensuring this data is "clean" means it needs to be verifiable, in the proper import format, and directly on-target to the CRM's queries.
A study(Opens in a new window) published in 2022 by Validity(Opens in a new window) surveyed more than 600 CRM-using organizations globally. When asked how CRM data impacted sales, 75% of respondents said that poor quality data had cost their firms customers. Another 44% estimated their businesses had lost at least 10% in annual revenue that was directly attributable to bad CRM data (see graphic below).
Estimated Annual Revenue Impact of Poor-Quality CRM Data
Ensuring good data quality is a matter of testing and constant vigilance. You'll need to run regular and repeatable tests on your system. Depending on the size of your staff and your CRM investment, the Validity report recommends you should also consider appointing a data management professional as the lead on keeping your CRM data clean. That person should manage the entire data flow, including not just your CRM but any apps connected to it. They should also handle the full spectrum of data management tasks, including automating data workflows, data protection, and backup. If you feel such a hire is in your future, you should pull that person in as early as possible, preferably at the evaluation stage before you purchase anything.
Keep It Simple and Supported
Complexity is a common blocker to CRM adoption. Some of the CRM products we review here tout a "highly customizable interface." That means a lot more than simply changing the look. Next to data gathering, a CRM's next-most important function is as a workflow hub. That means you can decide which data you want to collect, who should provide it, when they should provide it in your usual sales flow, and where it should wind up.
Along the way, you can retool your CRM's interface to show only the tools and features necessary to complete those steps. Everything else can stay in the background until it's needed. It can be a good deal of work getting your CRM to this point, and not all the tested products can do it. But taking advantage of deep customizability is one of the most effective ways to make sure your CRM instance is as easy to use as possible. That's step one for successful adoption.
The other end of the spectrum is what to do when things go wrong. Whether it's a software bug or simply some difficulty using a particular feature, you'll need a responsive support team. You can make that part of your SLA if you've got one, but if you don't, then you'll need to do your own verification:
Make sure to understand the level of support associated with your pricing tier and whether you can modify it.
Research the provider's support forum. You're checking for the kinds of questions that are being asked and how long it takes before a response is issued.
Check for DIY resources. Are there self-service tools for certain issues if there's a support site? If there are, be sure to run through them to see how effective they are. Search the knowledge base to see what kinds of articles are included and the usual format. Make sure this content will be helpful to you.
Investigate the product's training options. Complex tools usually require some level of training, so see what your service vendor provides. Is on-site, in-person training your only option or are there online resources, such as well-organized blogs, videos, and recorded webinars?
Make Mobility a Priority
Make sure to take a close look at the CRM solution's mobile app. This should be a separate app, not just a mobile "capability" (which almost always means a mobile-optimized version of the desktop website) and you also shouldn't be asked to pay anything extra for it. Mobile devices are an entirely different breed from desktops or notebooks. Employees use them differently and software renders them differently, which means that business processes that involve them will behave differently.
Make sure your CRM software of choice can support the mobile device platform your team uses. Are you providing every employee an iPhone or is yours a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) environment, which inevitably means supporting multiple platforms? Next, carefully evaluate what the app can do. Some apps offer a read-only view of your sales pipeline or contacts but don't let you make updates until you get back to a computer. Others offer a seamless and responsive experience, letting you do everything on a mobile device that you would on a computer. Don't commit to CRM software until you've used the mobile app in a way you and your team would do on a day-to-day basis. For many SMBs and their agents, the mobile component of a CRM app might be more critical than the desktop version.
Many CRM vendors cater directly to a mobile workforce. Those apps are full-featured with responsive web design and layouts dedicated to a mobile experience. If you have a field sales team that leaves their laptops behind and instead works on their tablets and smartphones, then you need to give them the tools they need, and these kinds of apps fit that bill.
Integrate With Your Existing Systems
Larger CRM platforms, such as Salesforce, have huge feature stacks that are sold as modules, with each module having a host of related features. If the features are what you need, then you can configure your entire solution simply by accessing the right set of modules. But if something is missing or your sales staff is simply more comfortable using something else, you may need to use software from third-party vendors to fill gaps. At that point, how well your CRM can integrate with other software platforms is key.
Integration takes two basic forms. The easiest is if the CRM system or the system to which you're trying to connect supports the other as a "native" integration. That means that the company has a pre-built integration module you can just download and use as needed. You'll have the best luck with big-name targets here, as many companies pre-build integrations for companies such as NetSuite or Salesforce, for example.
The other method is rolling your own integration. This is easiest if both systems have an open application programming interface (API). The most common standard here is representational state transfer (REST). With a REST API, you can have developers build a custom integration for you. That option certainly provides the most flexibility and customization, but it can also add significant costs depending on the level of your coding talent.
It's also worth looking at any third-party software you're considering, or indeed any software you already use, to see if there are integrations available from that side. Maybe you already have email marketing software that you love, or you want to connect your cloud storage service, lead management tool, or customer service management platform. As we've mentioned, you'll want to be able to connect your email account and perhaps your calendar, too.
Another excellent example of a value-add integration with CRM would be your product support or help desk platform. Next to your sales staff, your product support professionals probably have the most direct contact with your customers, and the information they gather in the course of even a short conversation can be gold to a salesperson. Problems with one product line can mean upsell opportunities to another.
Bottom line: Simply knowing that your CRM supports third-party integrations isn't enough, even at the outset of your purchase. The depth of integrations can vary hugely, so you need at least a semi-accurate understanding of the experience you want your salespeople and customers to have, now and in the future. Take your time and map this out as much as you can. You'll vastly decrease the likelihood of a deployment failure and get your staff excited about the new system at the same time.
Secure Your CRM Data
When you're working with the sales pipeline and customer data, make sure security is top of mind—especially if you're using a SaaS CRM solution (which means a big chunk, if not all, of your customer data resides in the cloud). You should feel comfortable with the company's security requirements. It's a warning sign when your CRM software lets you select a password but doesn't generate an audit trail whenever someone makes a change, or if it doesn't let you define access controls for each user. Customer data is an extremely valuable commodity, especially now that customers are more reluctant to part with it. Securing it isn't just about maintaining privacy; it's about protecting profitable relationships that directly impact your bottom line.
Integration plays a role here, but it's mostly about research. You can make sure your chosen CRM software can integrate with as much of your current IT security software as possible, such as your identity management system, for example, so your employees can take advantage of single sign-on authentication. But even more important than that is doing your homework. That means digging deep into the vendor's service level agreement (SLA) and ascertaining exactly where your data resides, who is responsible for its safety, and what happens if there's a problem. Doing some Google surfing to see whether this vendor has been breached in the past—and if they have, what their response was—is another good indicator of just what you're getting your data into.
How We Tested The Top CRMs
In this roundup, we tested 17 of the most popular CRM software packages on the market today. A few of them didn't make the cut this time, but the packages that did include Apptivo CRM, Freshsales CRM, HubSpot CRM, Insightly CRM, Less Annoying CRM, Pipedrive CRM, Sales Creatio, Salesforce Sales Cloud Lightning Professional, Zendesk Sell, and Zoho CRM. We've worked hard to evaluate this CRM software with the aforementioned criteria in mind, so check out each of the reviews to figure out which package is right for you. All have their strengths and weaknesses. Some are geared more toward small to midsize businesses (SMBs), while others have broader email marketing capabilities. Some CRM systems are easier to use out of the box, with simple navigations and standard workflows. Others offer deeper and more complicated customization. Some are dirt cheap, while others are quite expensive when you start moving up tiers, scaling up your sales workforce, or adding premium functionality.
Our top three selections remain Apptivo CRM, Sales Cloud Lightning Professional, and Zoho CRM, services that earned our Editors' Choice distinction for balanced feature sets and thoughtful integration features. Not all CRM solutions fit all business needs however, so it's important to survey the landscape and try newer entrants, such as Capsule CRM or Zendesk Sell (formerly Base CRM). New solutions can bring just the right amount of innovation to capture an SMBs attention. In the end, it is the balance of a businesses' needs, the size and scope of its sales team, and how the company engages with it is customers that will determine the best CRM solution for a business.
For more on contacting customers, check out The Best Email Marketing Software, The Best Small Business CRM Software, and The Best Lead Management Software.
Molly McLaughlin and Rob Marvin also contributed to this story.
