The 8 Best CRM for Sales
Sales, despite its association with negative stereotypes like cold callers and deceptive individuals, is actually a valuable skill that can greatly benefit from digital tools and data analysis. An organisation's success or failure heavily relies on its sales, as sales directly generate revenue.
Without sales, there’s no revenue. And without revenue, a business is headed for bankruptcy.
That's where CRMs come in to help you. It provides you with clear pipelines, lead tracking, email automation, follow-up reminders, and much more.
With these tools, you can modernise your sales pipeline, ensuring you no longer conduct sales on hunches or gut feelings but on concrete data and analytics.
But with so many options available, choosing the right CRM platform for your business can be overwhelming.
That’s why we have compiled a list of the best CRMs for sales that we tested ourselves, considering different factors like accessibility, support, integrability and user reviews.
Rundown
- Best free sales CRM platform: HubSpot CRM, “ It is an easy-to-use free CRM that provides a real-time view of the entire sales funnel. It allows you to easily track and manage your leads, deals, and sales activities, ensuring visibility and control over the sales process.”
- All-in-one CRM for sales: Monday.com, “It is a customisable CRM that seamlessly integrates with your project management tasks. It can automate sales cycles, manage sales pipelines, and track customer data in one place.”
- Best CRM for sales pipeline management: PipeDrive, “Pipedrive is a user-friendly sales CRM that facilitates pipeline management, analytics, and team collaboration. In addition to the standard lead management and client relationship tools, it includes a visual sales pipeline and a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface.”
- Best for Lead Management: Freshsales, “Freshsales employs AI-powered tools to assist you in lead scoring, lead assignment, and prioritisation, allowing you to focus on the most promising leads. It also provides a customisable visual pipeline for lead management.”
- Best CRM for customer prospecting: Nimble, “It is an easy-to-use CRM that enhances the organisation and efficiency of prospecting sales teams through its Prospector engine, contact action lists, and social tracking feature.”
- Best CRM for lead generation: Zoho CRM, “Zoho CRM is an AI-powered CRM that allows you to maximise your marketing efforts and effectively capture incoming leads from a multitude of platforms, including websites, landing pages, social media, events, and more.”
- Best CRM for email marketing: Brevo, “Brevo CRM provides tools and functionalities that enable you to effectively engage with their prospects and customers through targeted email campaigns. You can set up personalised email sequences, automate follow-ups, and track email engagement metrics such as opens, clicks, and conversions.”
- Best CRM software for marketing campaigns: Insightly CRM, “It has a straightforward interface that helps identify and focus on high-potential leads with its pipeline view and customisable details. It also allows you to customise fields, layouts, dashboards, and reports.”
How We Found the Best CRMs for Sales
Choosing the Best CRMs for Sales requires extensive research and evaluation.
We carefully looked at many different platforms and evaluated them based on certain criteria to find the most reliable and effective ones.
In this list, there are different CRMs for different use cases, like; some are for lead generation, customer prospecting, etc.
We have curated this list following the following criteria:
- Platform utilisation: We went beyond the reviews and personally tried the platforms firsthand to comprehensively understand their features, functionalities, and user experience.
- Features: We examined each CRM's feature set and evaluated them based on their effectiveness in addressing common sales challenges, such as lead management, data organisation, and user adoption. We looked for CRMs that offer robust solutions to these challenges and provide a seamless experience for users.
- Ease of Use: A user-friendly interface is essential for a CRM because it increases user adoption and decreases the time required to learn how to use it. For this reason, we searched for CRMs that are intuitive and easy to navigate, without sacrificing functionality.
- Integration: A CRM must integrate with other tools and platforms to optimise the sales process. Therefore, we looked for CRMs that offer seamless integration with existing tools like email clients, calendars, or project management software.
- Customisation: Each business is unique, and a one-size-fits-all approach does not work. For this reason, we sought out CRMs that allow customisation to align with specific business needs and sales processes.
- Scalability: As businesses grow, their sales requirements evolve. For this reason, we considered CRMs that are scalable, accommodating increased data volumes, additional users, and expanded functionality as needed.
Recommended CRMs for Sales
Best free CRM for small business
HubSpot CRM
HubSpot CRM is a free CRM software that can help to streamline your sales pipeline.
It has solutions for every stage of the sales funnel.
At the beginning of the sales process, It has marketing tools that help you attract and capture leads.
You can create and manage effective marketing campaigns, monitor your website analytics, and connect with your target audience through social media platforms.
As you progress through the sales funnel, HubSpot allows you to track interactions, set follow-up reminders, and automate repetitive tasks.
When closing deals, you can streamline the process with deal tracking, pipeline management, and seamless communication through email integration.
It also helps you retain customers with features like feedback surveys, customer support, and knowledge base tools.
The best things about HubSpot are:
- It provides a user-friendly tool to help you efficiently track and manage your deals throughout the sales pipeline.
- It seamlessly integrates with popular tools and platforms like email clients, calendars, and project management software.
- It offers user-friendly workflow automation options for tasks of varying complexity, improving overall productivity.
- HubSpot CRM is also highly scalable. It can easily accommodate increased data volumes, additional users, and expanded functionality as your business grows and evolves.
All-in-one CRM for sales
Monday.com
If you don't have a centralised system for lead generation and management, it's easy for important leads to fall through the cracks, and you might struggle to capture and nurture leads effectively.
Monday.com is an all-in-one sales CRM that combines task management, CRM, and project management tools all in one platform.
The lead generation tools provided by Monday.com help you capture and track leads through various channels, such as forms, social media, and live chat. This ensures that no lead goes unnoticed, and they can be effectively nurtured to increase conversion rates.
Moreover, It has contact management features to ensure that all relevant information about your leads is organised and easily accessible. You'll have a complete and holistic view of each lead, allowing for better personalisation and engagement.
The best things about Monday.com are:
- From a comprehensive sales pipeline view to efficient automation and client communication features, this versatile CRM platform helps you to stay organised.
- The sales process is efficiently organised based on tasks.
- Seamlessly transitions between CRM and project management, enabling smooth workflow.
- Personalisation is made easy with flexible drag-and-drop options available in the tool.
Monday.com also offers user-friendly workflow automation tools which streamline time-consuming administrative tasks, such as email follow-ups and reminders.
Best CRM for sales pipeline management
PipeDrive
Tracking and managing potential leads and deals throughout the sales process is crucial to your operations. Without a proper system in place, you may struggle to monitor the progress of each deal, the tasks involved, and key milestones.
Pipedrive CRM has a user-friendly platform with an easy-to-use visual approach that helps you manage your sales pipelines.
It has a drag-and-drop feature that simplifies the process of moving deals through stages, improving the visibility and management of the sales cycle.
It also offers automation tools that streamline repetitive tasks, such as email follow-ups, saving time and energy.
The best things about PipeDrive are:
- It offers in-depth contact management features such as comprehensive profiles, activity logs, and a timeline of contacts' interactions.
- Seamlessly integrates with various tools and platforms, enabling smooth data transfer and enhanced collaboration.
- It also offers a few sales-related add-ons like LeadBooster and Web Visitors.
Additionally, its AI-powered Sales Assistant function provides personalised guidance and suggestions that help to optimise sales strategies and boost performance.
Best for Lead Management
FreshSales
FreshSales CRM offers a dedicated lead scoring system, which allows you to prioritise your leads based on their interactions and potential. By focusing your efforts on high-value prospects, you can maximise your conversion rates and save valuable time.
It also offers high levels of customisation. You can create custom fields and set up workflow automation to match your unique processes seamlessly.
Freshsales helps you focus on your goals by automating crucial tasks throughout your sales pipeline. You can automate the following activities to ensure productive lead nurturing:
- Lead qualification
- Lead assignment
- Warmly welcome new leads
- Seamlessly update contact status as they progress along the pipeline
- Receive reminders for follow-ups
- Get reminders for important sales activities
- Send emails efficiently and effectively
The best things about FreshSales are:
- Easy to use
- Multiple communication channels for sales teams to engage with leads
- Has advanced AI features that help you identify and focus on leads who are most likely to convert.
In addition, FreshSales provides insightful reports and analytics that give you a deep understanding of your lead management performance.
You can track key metrics, identify trends, and make data-driven decisions to optimise your sales processes further.
Best CRM for customer prospecting
Nimble
If you are looking for a solution to optimise your sales process and improve customer engagement, then Nimble CRM is worth checking out.
Nimble CRM helps you to efficiently manage your leads, prospects, and customer interactions.
You can input and update contact information, notes, and interactions with just a few clicks, keeping yourself well-informed and always prepared to engage with your customers.
It also seamlessly integrates with popular social media channels, providing all the necessary information within the CRM.
The best things about Nimble are:
- It has a user-friendly interface.
- It has advanced segmentation capabilities that help you to categorise your prospects. This lets you personalise your messaging and outreach, resulting in higher response rates and more successful prospecting campaigns.
- It offers email tracking and analytics features that provide insights into email opens, clicks, and responses.
Best CRM for lead generation
Zoho CRM
If you struggle with organising and tracking your leads efficiently, then Zoho CRM is worth checking out.
Zoho CRM has an enhanced lead management system that can help you to capture, assign, and track leads effectively. Through features like lead scoring, automation, and seamless integration with various lead capture tools, you can prioritise leads and nurture them more effectively, resulting in higher conversion rates.
It helps you capture leads from your landing pages hosted on platforms like WordPress, Unbounce, Joomla, and other content management systems without requiring any coding skills.
It also has a mobile app to access and manage your leads, contacts, and deals anytime and anywhere.
The best things about Zoho CRM are:
- Complete event-to-sale process: You can use Zoho CRM as your central communication platform for interacting with event attendees. This allows you to send invitations to your existing CRM contacts or leads and easily connect with new leads you gathered during the event.
- Capture leads from events: It integrates your Google Ad expenditure with your sales information, enabling you to identify the campaigns, advertisements, or keywords that are contributing to converting leads into customers.
- Convert social chatter to actionable leads: You also have the option to manually add leads from the Social Tab or automate your lead generation process. By setting up triggers, you can automatically add leads and contacts from social media platforms, specifically targeting your desired customer interactions.
Best CRM for email marketing
Brevo
If you need a CRM to streamline and optimise your email marketing campaigns, then Brevo is worth checking out.
Brevo has a drag-and-drop email builder that can help you easily design and customise emails without the need for coding skills. This enables you to create visually appealing and engaging emails that resonate with your leads and customers.
Brevo also provides responsive email templates, ensuring emails look great on any device.
The best things about Brevo are:
- Has advanced features that help you prioritise leads based on their engagement levels with your emails.
- It also facilitates automated campaigns and drip marketing, enabling you to nurture leads effortlessly and guide them through the sales funnel.
- There are no limits on the volume of emails you can send, allowing you to expand your reach and increase engagement without incurring additional expenses.
- It seamlessly integrates with other software platforms such as Google Ads, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
Best CRM software for marketing campaigns
Insightly CRM
Insightly CRM helps marketing teams seamlessly plan, execute, and track their campaigns.
From creating targeted email campaigns to managing social media advertisements, Insightly CRM provides all the necessary tools in one integrated platform.
It has a 'Opportunities' feature that opens up a pipeline view, showing all potential deals and highlighting those requiring immediate action.
In addition, the 'Opportunities' feature, it provides a pipeline view and customsable details, that helps you to identify and focus on high-potential leads.
It also automates repetitive tasks like lead nurturing, email marketing, and follow-up.
The best things about Insightly CRM are:
- Its interface is user-friendly and straightforward. It also offers customisable dashboards to suit your preferences.
- You can create custom fields, design page layouts, and generate personalised dashboards and reports.
- You can efficiently manage your leads, convert them into opportunities, and customise your pipelines according to your specific needs.
- There is also extensive support available, including phone and email support, an online knowledge base, webinars, and community forums.
For small to medium-sized workflows, workflow automation is available, but it might not have all the advanced features needed by big businesses.
