The Best CRM Software Systems for 2022

Customer relationships are essential to the success of your brand.

Without the right connection to your audience, you can’t hope to turn those one-time purchases into repeat transactions. Fortunately, building a community of dedicated customers doesn’t have to be as complicated as it seems.

CRM software, or Customer Relationship Management tools, are solutions intended to automate the process of building deeper connections with your customers. Through the right CRM technology, you can gain a better understanding of the steps your customers take when they engage in a buying journey with you.

For instance, what are the questions your customers normally ask before they buy a product similar to yours? What kind if issues might stop your customers from buying from you, or send them rushing to your competitors instead?

CRM software can help you to better understand your audience, and keep track of your conversations with them, without relying on an excel spreadsheet.

So, what’s the best CRM software?

Introducing CRM Software

CRM software is the secret to seamlessly integrating business intelligence with marketing campaigns, sales automation, and customer support in one centralized platform. That means sales reps get to work hand in hand with their marketing counterparts for the sake of common business goals. All the team members are kept on the same page, with workflow management tools setting a clear path for each individual’s roles.

The success of the entire system depends on how you capitalize on your customer interaction opportunities without compromising the corresponding customer experience. Hence, your CRM software should gather relevant contact information, and then combine it with its business intelligence for meaningful conversations.

And speaking of which, a quick scan through a customer’s profile should give you insights into what they’ve purchased in the past, how they handled the purchase processes, their contact details, as well as the subsequent customer satisfaction levels.

Ok, I know what you might be thinking right now. Don’t these features make a CRM system sound like a regular business spreadsheet? So, what’s the difference between leveraging CRM software and keeping your contact information in one long spreadsheet?

Interestingly, that happens to be a common question when it comes to CRM applications. And as it turns out, quite a huge chunk of small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs) all over the world actually rely on simple spreadsheets for lead management.

However, the fact is, spreadsheets are nowhere close to CRM software. While the former relies on a manual system of managing information, the latter goes beyond that by combining contact insights with automated follow-up processes.

In essence, modern CRM platforms come with a brain that can collect and record your lead information, then consequently use it to drive sales conversations based on the specific rules you set. A CRM software is capable of piecing together all every single bit of data it collects about your leads, and then use the resultant insights to systematically target individuals with personalized messages across multiple channels.

Choosing The Best CRM Systems – State of The CRM Solutions Market

A word of caution though. Although there are numerous CRM software options on the web right now, not all of them offer the functionalities we’ve mentioned. The current CRM market is quite extensive, with all sorts of solutions providing different types of marketing, sales, and pipeline management features.

While the resultant competition between them makes CRM software conveniently cheaper, it also presents a fairly difficult challenge. Sorting through all that forest of potential solutions is no walk in the park.

But, luckily for you, we understand that you may not have the time to conduct a comprehensive evaluation. You’re probably too busy running your business and worrying about acquiring new customers.

So, we took the time to do the heavy lifting for you. Our team here at Ecommerce-Platforms has been evaluating different types of CRM software for the past couple of months, and here’s the resultant report.

This article goes beyond the standard stuff for CRM systems. It’s not just about good CRM software. Rather, we comprehensively evaluated the leading options down to the last detail to establish the ultimate list of the 10 best CRM software.

So, let’s explore every single one of them as we highlight their core features for marketing automation, customer data management, lead scoring, sales forecasting, pipeline management, lead generation, workflow management, project management, task management, sales automation, email marketing, etc.

This guide, therefore, is for serious marketing professionals, sales teams, and business owners that want the best for their companies.

But, if you’re in a hurry, here’s a brief breakdown of our overall best pick, the best budget CRM software, the best CRM software for small businesses, as well as the best free CRM software.

And in case you’d like to discover the formula we used to evaluate them, this article provides pointers on how to choose the best CRM software for your business. You’ll find them towards the end, right after our list of the 10 best CRM software.

What Is The Best CRM Software For a Small Business?

All things considered, Sendinblue CRM is the overall best CRM software solution for small businesses.

Now, as for the ultimate best CRM software, I guess that depends on you. What you’d consider as the overall best depends on your company structure, plus the needs of your sales and marketing processes.

So, to help you make an informed selection, here’s our detailed guide on the best CRM software options for small businesses.

What Is The Best Free CRM Software?

While there are multiple free CRM software solutions with decent feature offerings, HubSpot CRM is the most dominant one.

This cloud-based CRM software solution is in a world of its own since it provides pretty much all the CRM functionalities you can think of for free. Plus, all that comes with a pleasant, user-friendly interface.

Come to think of it, I guess HubSpot can afford to pull this off because the company generates its profits from a wide range of other supplementary ecommerce tools.

Whatever the case, however, don’t get it twisted. While HubSpot CRM is doing a great job in this space, it ‘s not the only perfect option. Of late, several of its competitors have seemingly been giving it a good run for its money.

? Find out all about them from our comprehensive review of the best free CRM software.

The 10 Best CRM Software Solutions in 2022

• HubSpot CRM
• Sendinblue CRM
• Freshworks CRM
• Salesforce CRM
• Zoho CRM
• Agile CRM
• Insightly CRM
• Pipedrive CRM
• SugarCRM
• Nimble CRM
• NetSuite CRM

How to Choose the Best CRM Software

Well, there you have it. The ultimate guide to 10 of the best CRM software.

A word of caution though. While each of these CRM solutions provides some of the best customer relationship management features, it would be unwise to pick one randomly.

And why is that so?

Well, as we’ve established, every single one of them is unique in its own sense. Hence, they’d have varying impacts on your business.

So, how exactly should you compare different options to choose the best CRM software?

The truth is, there’s no two ways about it. You have to systematically evaluate not just the pricing, but also the type of functionalities each tool offers.

And to help you with that, here are the main features you should focus on when it comes to customer relationship management systems:

• Lead Management and Sales Management: The best CRM software products are capable of hunting for leads across multiple sources. They employ an omnichannel strategy that integrates several digital engagement channels to form seamless lead management and sales management platform.

Apart from emails, you should be able to tap into other popular channels like social media, web forms, inbound calls, text messages, etc. The specifics depend on what your target leads commonly use.

Then after lead generation, the CRM software should allow you to follow up all the way to the end of the customer lifecycle. That means applying different automated approaches while keeping tabs on every single prospect’s progress on the sales pipeline.

• Marketing: Since customer relationships are nurtured through personalized engagements, the top CRM software happen to double up as digital marketing tools. The marketing functionalities here are used to reach out to leads, customers, plus prospects.

And when it comes to that, the best CRM software for your business should come with AI-driven marketing automation. Plus, the campaigns should be fully intertwined with your sales pipeline.

• Workflows: Customer relationship management admittedly entails numerous stages and multiple intricate elements, which are best managed with project management tools.

Hence, the best CRM software usually provide dynamic project management capabilities through customizable workflows. This is where you get to streamline your sales pipelines accordingly while coordinating your sales teams, tracking progress, and organizing the corresponding entities.

• Reports and Analytics: All things considered, customer relationship management is a data-driven process. The type of leads you go for, how you target them, and how you engage with them depends on the insights you’re able to gather about them. So, reports and analytics is one thing you cannot afford to compromise.

You should particularly prioritize CRM products that offer accurate real-time analytics about all your core engagement channels, marketing campaigns, sales pipeline, contact behaviors, as well as your team’s performance. That said, it would also be advisable to choose a software product that can further generate sales forecasting insights. This will help you identify the most promising sales opportunities.

• Ecommerce: The best CRM software go beyond sales and marketing to focus on other closely-related ecommerce processes. Some platforms, for instance, supplement their core CRM functionalities with customer support tools, while others tend to lean towards team collaboration.

That said, you should choose the extra ecommerce functionalities based on your business setup, plus the specific entities you consider to be critical to your relationship with customers.

• Integrations: At the end of the day, a customer relationship management tool forms just one part of the entire ecommerce ecosystem. So, a CRM software solution can only be a great fit for your business if it perfectly integrates with all your core systems. Plus, it should come with pre-built integrations for third-party applications you intend to use in our campaigns.

With that in mind, here are some of the questions you should ask yourself to analyze the suitability of each CRM software option:

• What type of businesses does it target?
• What types of automated marketing campaigns can you run and manage with the CRM software?
• Is the sales pipeline customizable?
• How’s the overall interface design? Is it easy to use and navigate? Does it offer any onboarding features?
• How many team members can the CRM software host concurrently?
• Does the CRM software integrate with your current ecommerce platform? How well does it work with other marketing tools?
• Will you be able to identify the best deals to prioritize?
• How many contacts and leads can the CRM tool hold? How many can you engage concurrently?
• Does the CRM software offer comprehensive data protection? What other security features does it come with?
• How much does the entire CRM system cost? Does it fit your budget?
• What’s the possible ROI based on the value you get from the software? Are there any extra charges that you might incur along the way?
• What do past and current users say about the software? Any notable negatives you can identify from the reviews?

Then to top it off, be sure to check out our unbiased reviews about various tools in this space. We’ve covered all the best CRM software solutions on the market in detail.