FOUR OF THE BEST CRM PLATFORMS
HubSpot CRM Free
CRM Free is split into multiple “hubs” for managing marketing, sales, operations, customer service and content management – and, as the name suggests, there’s a free tier for anyone who wants to try before they buy. In fact, the free plan may be all that small companies need, as it allows you to store up to a million contacts and companies, integrate live chat and bots, schedule emails, manage advertising and more.
As you would expect of a fully featured CRM, HubSpot’s free offering supports tailored views and functions for different users with an organisation, so salespeople, marketers and business owners can all work with the same data for different purposes.
Add a contact to the database, and HubSpot can automatically fill out the record with data pulled in from 20 million businesses, and all leads are tracked within the system to give a live view of ongoing interactions with customers.
Should you decide to upgrade for more advanced features, packages are offered for starter, professional and enterprise users, allowing organisations to manage their bills as they grow.
Monday.com
Monday.com bills itself as a “work OS that lets you shape workflows, your way”. It includes modules for project management, HR, operations and other functions, alongside managing sales and CRM. The various components can be linked so that, whichever best suits the needs of any stakeholder, they can all collaborate with a single goal in mind. With custom dashboards to visualise data, Kanban boards to manage workflows and integrated document sharing, it’s conceivable that many organisations could happily work wholly within Monday.com.
To help you get started, Monday.com offers over 200 ready-made templates and workflows, covering everything from lead management and campaign planning to contact tracking and centralising supporting materials. It’s extensible, too, with over 100 add-ons enabling common business functions such as document signing, backup and hooking into third-party services such as Google Ads, Mailchimp and LinkedIn.
If you want to try out the service, the free individual plan accommodates – despite the name – up to two seats, with unlimited boards and documents. Beyond this, the paid-for Basic service comes with 5GB of online storage and a single dashboard; Standard adds 250 automations and 250 integrations per month, plus five dashboards; and Pro increases each of these allowances, as well as mixing in time tracking and private boards. These plans cost £7, £9 and £14 per seat respectively, billed annually, with a three-seat minimum at each tier.
Salesforce
Salesforce is one of the biggest and best-known CRM providers of all. It’s so closely associated with the sector that the company’s official stock symbol is CRM. But Salesforce isn’t just about collecting and managing customer data: in recent years the company has expanded its portfolio to encompass the Tableau data visualisation platform and Slack, among other assets.
As with other platform-based CRM tools, Salesforce’s products work together so that businesses can develop a tailor-made solution for their operation. Salesforce Sales Cloud will sit at the heart of many operations, allowing individual users to manage their own accounts, with oversight of contacts, lead management and tracking of internal conversations. Data can be organised using dashboards to give at-a-glance feedback on current performance, and to surface the insights businesses require to make real-time decisions.
Pricing starts with an Essentials plan for small businesses with up to ten users at £20 per user per month, billed annually. For more advanced features, including lead generation and collaborative forecasting, you’ll need to investigate an upgrade: Professional, Enterprise and Unlimited plans roll in progressively more tools at £60, £120 and £240 per user per month, respectively.
Zoho
Rather than producing a single CRM product with different tiers of features and pricing, Zoho offers a range of products to suit different organisational profiles. The headline product is Zoho CRM: currently used by more than 250,000 companies, including Amazon India, Bose and Suzuki, this system includes social media monitoring, live web chat and integrations with more than 50 telephony providers, allowing users to make and log calls while simultaneously accessing customer data.
It also works with companion products such as Zoho Meeting, which means presentations can be planned through the same tool, eliminating the friction of working across disconnected products from multiple providers. Prices start at £12 per user per month, billed annually, but if you need integrated AI and BI you’ll need to upgrade to Enterprise or Ultimate respectively, at £35 and £42 per user per month, billed annually.
For smaller businesses, Zoho Bigin is a pipelinecentric CRM, in which your business is broken down by task – such as sales, services or marketing – so data relating to each can be kept separate when in use, to help maintain focus. It costs £5 or £10 per user per month for up to 50,000 or 100,000 records respectively, although businesses with fewer than
500 records can get started gratis on the Free plan, which includes lead and contact management, deal management and charting.