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Customer Relationship Management, more popularly known as CRM software helps businesses to organize, streamline, and access customer data. It enhances the quality of the relationship between an organization and its customers, along with empowering sales and managing the workload of the sales team with efficiency and ease. This improvement is bought through the storage and organization of customer data besides sales leads and marketing data.

Today, best CRM software tools can be installed in your office, inside your corporate firewall, or be made available to you as a cloud-based (web-based) software as hosted by a CRM provider and accessed by you anytime anywhere via the hosting services.

Although customer relationship management nowadays has become a pile on bells and whistles to attract customers, the fact is that there are some core features which are resulting in a real-time impact on businesses. So, it is highly important to keep in mind some essential features of this tool before finalizing it for the business.

1. Simple & Easy Integration

It is always advisable to have online CRM software with an easy and simple integration process as it will not make any sense to have the tool if one cannot use it. Difficulty in integrating and using the tools leads to de-motivation of users and lead to no-where in such terms

2. Remote Access

It is a must to have remote access to the data stored in top Customer Relationship Management software as it is no use if it can be accessed only in the office. Data must be accessible in all forms and from all locations. There is another brand new usage of remote access to data. 24/7 availability is the key factor of success nowadays and thus to ensure this, one needs remote access to any data through best online CRM systems.

3. Mobile Access

With mobile access, it is meant that one can able to see data on their hand-held devices. People now traveling around to the world to make their business go global needs such as useful software to work with their walk and get in business anytime and anywhere.

4. Strong Multi-channel Support

Software must have this feature to strengthen the mobile access of data or documents. Such features enable mobile usage of software and make the workflow smoother and easier. With strong multi-channel support, top CRM tools for small business enables the work go smoother and ensure better results for the business.

5. Integrated Analytics

It is equally essential to understand the data and analyze it accordingly. So, along with data collection, it is important to have access to decision-making analytics tools as well.

6. Campaign & data Management

The software must have a campaign as well as a data management tool. This will enable any and every business to have a watch on the entire workflow along with managing multiple data lists.

7. Flexible and Customization

There is a CRM aphorism that each CRM has s special touch – meaning customization in itself. Customizations lead to fulfilling the exact requirement of business and fetch invaluable results.

8. Lead Generation Along With Follow-up Tracking

It is not advisable to depend solely on the sales but has the best CRM system solutions developed to create leads and have a follow-up function attached to it. Such tools can always help the business grow and fetch in more fruitful results through its operations.

To grow business smartly & differently and reach the zenith, Customer Relation Management software could be one of the keys. Once a luxury meant for large companies, the customer relationship management software has now become one of the most critical components for a successful business setup.

The focal point of best customer relationship management software for small businesses is to enrich the qualitative aspect of the business by enhancing the relationship between the business body and its clients. This sort of best CRM software in India enables the business to strengthen the sales team by managing their workload with efficiency and smoothness. Further, these given techniques are upgraded through the storage method and by organizing the customer data. In addition to up-gradation through sales leads and marketing data.

Another major benefit of using web-based CRM solutions is that one gets a consolidated data. Best customer relationship management software can merge all possible information provided by customers in one straightforwardly accessible client interface. This way the biggest CRM system removes the requirement of separate spreadsheets, document files and, other tools used in businesses. Thus, such a consolidated interface helps get a solitary view of the complete life-cycle of the client’s work starting from the fundamental information to various communications with employees. Various CRM tools and software are used to keep selves informed about the vendors, suppliers, and other partners along with the client’s communication details and other aspects.

This new-age technology called customer relationship management system software primarily incorporates the tools that make the users track various emails and logs; it is also used to used attach data and records. Online CRM software helps the business stay informed of services that are delivered or undelivered. It also helps oversee leads and capture the workflow and follow-up accordingly, follow-up, and categorize all issues as per their potentialities.

The latest developed best CRM solutions also provide some features which consider the performance as well as the productivity of the business. However, the use of such tools is subject to technical knowledge but such technological advancements have helped businesses reach a new height.

It's hard to deny that CRM software has become a fundamental tool for businesses. With more than 91% of medium-large sized companies and 50% of small businesses using CRM software, it is no surprise that CRM is the biggest software market in the world, with its market size expected to reach $80 billion by 2025.

Here, we'll take a look at some of the biggest CRM vendors by market share and company size, along with a few great picks depending upon the size of your business.

Enterprise Medium Small Business Hubspot Zendesk Zeki SalesForce Sugar Pipedrive Microsoft Insightly Nimble SAP NetSuite Apptivo Zoho Leadsquared Cratio

CRM Software Comparison for Enterprise CRM Systems

Enterprises or large businesses with more than 500 employees should pick CRM systems that offer specific functionality, such as sales automation, project management, and more. Furthermore, integration is one of the essential features enterprises should look for. Some of the best picks can be HubSpot, SalesForce, and Microsoft Dynamics.

HubSpot SalesForce Microsoft Dynamics Free Trial 14 Day 30 Day 30 day Mobile App check_circle check_circle check_circle Cloud Hosting check_circle check_circle check_circle Basic Price $35/month $25/month $50/month Email Tracking check_circle check_circle check_circle Social Media Integration check_circle check_circle cancel Report/Analysis check_circle check_circle check_circle Multi-Channel Communication check_circle check_circle check_circle Contact Management check_circle check_circle check_circle Lead Management check_circle check_circle check_circle Finance Management cancel check_circle cancel Sales Management check_circle check_circle check_circle Task Management check_circle check_circle check_circle Marketing Automation check_circle check_circle check_circle CRM Software Comparison for Medium-Sized Businesses Medium-sized companies are transitioning from small businesses to a full-fledged global enterprise, and they require a CRM solution that offers a blend of specific functionality as well as all-in-one features. Moreover, these systems can be either cloud-based or on-premise depending upon the requirements. These three options can best for medium-sized businesses. Zendesk Sugar Insightly Free Trial 30 Day 7 Day 14 day Mobile App check_circle check_circle check_circle Cloud Hosting check_circle check_circle check_circle Basic Price $19/month $52/month $29/month Email Tracking check_circle check_circle check_circle Social Media Integration check_circle check_circle cancel Report/Analysis check_circle check_circle check_circle Multi-Channel Communication check_circle cancel cancel Contact Management check_circle check_circle check_circle Lead Management cancel check_circle check_circle Finance Management check_circle cancel check_circle Sales Management check_circle check_circle check_circle Task Management check_circle check_circle check_circle Marketing Automation cancel check_circle check_circle CRM Software Comparison for Small Businesses Small businesses need to essentially invest in multi-purpose, cloud-based CRM solutions that help them facilitate business operations at a minimal cost. Some of the best CRM software systems for small businesses include Zeki, PipeDrive, and Nimble. Zeki Pipedrive Nimble Free Trial 30 Day 14 Day 14 day Mobile App cancel check_circle check_circle Cloud Hosting check_circle check_circle check_circle Basic Price No Specific $12.5/month $19/month Email Tracking check_circle check_circle check_circle Social Media Integration check_circle cancel check_circle Report/Analysis check_circle check_circle check_circle Multi-Channel Communication cancel cancel cancel Contact Management check_circle check_circle check_circle Lead Management check_circle check_circle cancel Finance Management cancel cancel cancel Sales Management check_circle check_circle check_circle Task Management check_circle check_circle check_circle Marketing Automation cancel cancel check_circle CRM Software Used by Industries As stated, Mostly used CRM software in the service industry with 32%, IT and manufacturing both with 13%, and finance industry at 10% of the total CRM System uses. For clarification, many manufacturing industries are preferred to purchase ERP Solutions with an integrated CRM System.



The CRM tools Implementation can be best understood as a stage process. Starting from gathering the information of your customers and evaluating it for using that information to increase your sales, marketing, and customer experience.

1. Information Gathering

Firstly you need to gather the information that your customers need to be identified by you and their behavior should be categorized. The companies having online customer services and their website can have an advantage over other companies in the market. The customers can fill, update, and maintain their data when they are buying something or inquiring.

2. Information Storage

The relational database is the best-centralized customer database in which the storage and management of your customers’ information can be done effectively. The relational database will allow you to run all of your systems from the same origin. It also ensures that everybody is using up-to-date and accurate information.

3. Information Access

Information Access using online CRM software will be the next stage after collecting or gathering information about the customers and storing it centrally. It is important to make this information available to all the staff members in the most useful format.

4. Study The Behavior of The Customer

You can begin to profile customers and develop various and important sales strategies by using data mining tools in spreadsheet programs which can analyze the data to identify patterns and relationships. So the analysis of customer behavior is the most important aspect of CRM programs.

5. Marketing More Aggressively and Effectively

It is the mindset of many companies or businesses that the high percentage of their profits is generated by a small percentage of their customers. The companies can target and reward their most valuable customers by using the best online CRM systems/ CRM tracking System. They can gain a better understanding of their customers’ needs.

6. Intensify The Customer Experience

A small number of customers who are having complaints often take up a disproportionate amount of staff time as a small group of customers are the most profitable. The staff will have more time for other customers if the problem of customers having complaints can be solved quickly.

1. Sales Force Automation

Sales Force Automation (SFA) is a software tool that automates every task in the function of Sales. Right from order processing to order tracking, managing information, contact management, inventory management (monitoring and control), customer management, sales forecast analysis, and employee performance evaluation. SFA is time-saving, improves performance, and in turn revenues, and takes care of customer service resulting to repeat customers.

With this tool, you and your team can have instant access to order details. This way you can share a close connection of trust with the customer, guiding him to the status of the order's arrival. Any query made by the customer about his order can be answered by you in a matter of seconds because all the real-time information is available right in front of you.

2. Lead Management

Lead management is the first step of acquiring the customer. Once this step is completed, leads(a list of strong potential buyers with some of their details) are passed on to the Sales department. In this way, the lead management process acts as the bridge between two important departments, namely marketing, and sales.

This is the process in which your company engages for the very first time and interacts with your buyer at a stage where he is just a potential buyer. This process often becomes challenging when your leads are in the numbers of thousands, lakhs, and more. Why will this tool work for your company? Well, for one it will keep your company focused on the tactics that work and bring in the right leads. Further, you can track leads effectively with this tool and you can clinch most of your winning deals. For example, you've launched toothpaste and it's getting very popular among the youths, like the college youths. You can then tailor-make your campaign focusing on the likes of college youths to engage them more effectively.

3. Opportunity Management

The CRM tool for Opportunity Management gives you the pearls of opportunities in sales. Pure leads are just basic information and that's meaningless unless it is filtered as per your company requirement. This analyzing and filtering job is done by this tool. It judges the leads and puts the qualified ones as an opportunity in the sales pipeline. Would you like to waste your time on meaningless and useless leads? Of course not! That's why this software is for you as your hundreds and thousands and even lakhs of leads are processed and filtered through this sophisticated mechanism so that you can focus on relevant information in a relaxed way. Thus in this way, this tool efficiently supports the sales automation tool function.

4. Contact Management

This is much more than your Outlook's list of contacts. Over the years, sales management and contact management software have evolved as close-knit tools. It is vital in this age to have your contact information fully synchronized with your sales software. Here the behavior of your contacts is integrated with their names in the list, so you get a 360-degree view of his entire purchase history, likes, dislikes, preferences, etc. This is a great guide in a go; it is like the social security in the U.S. On the press of a button, you get all the information on a certain customer to take the performance of your sales and customer service team many levels beyond. An example of this is if you are selling life insurance and you are calling to discuss a new plan with your customer, wouldn't you like to know all about that person before you start a discussion with him?

5. Task Management

How do you ensure your sales rep is following the right path "step by step" in his sales process? You can simply spell the steps out, beforehand. Yes, absolutely. And here in this aspect of CRM tool, Task Management takes care of exactly this. It lists out these steps as "tasks" and keeps it as a ready reckoner available for your sales force to access it anytime they need it. For example, there could be a common folder that gives access to every salesperson to the rules as well as the best practices of each sales stage clearly defined.

6. Sales Forecasting

In your highly comprehensive and integrated marketing Online CRM software tools. you can easily predict (to a high degree of accuracy) the future sales of your product. Since you have a robust infrastructure in terms of lead management, you can easily come to near accurate ballpark figures of your product's future sales and create necessary marketing and business plans according to that.

For example: If you are in the book business, your pre-orders and your sales inquiries are going to be extremely important to you. Publishing costs are high per single copy. Hence, one has to keep the campaign running judiciously strictly as per your sales pipeline.

7. Campaign Management

Wouldn't it be great to run your marketing campaign from your cloud-based CRM system? When all your customer information is inside the storehouse of your cloud-based CRM tools, why not launch your campaign from there itself?

You can do it effortlessly. Campaign Management is now available as part of the leading CRM solutions and you can launch and track the success of the campaign right from your best CRM software solutions.

For example: If you are running an online ad on Facebook for your contact lenses, and you are using all the customer intelligence info from your CRM to target your campaign to the right audience. If during the tracking of your campaign that a new type of lens is getting more popular within your customers, you can create a new campaign just focusing on that lens that people seem to be like more and ordering more. You can even set your campaign on automated Drip mode. Your campaigns are 100% traceable and measurable and you can evaluate your campaign for your every single cent spent.

8. Invoice Management

This tool is going to save you from a future headache. Managing invoices is the most boring and monotonous part of being in business. With your best CRM software solutions, you can now raise bills and invoices automatically. Once your order is finalized, the software will generate your invoice as per the quotation. Your invoice management can be automated by your popular CRM system end-to-end. You can even set alerts and reminders for your invoice due dates.

9. Social CRM

With the advent of social media, this is a new feature added to the online CRM tools. This tool enables you to manage your social media interaction with your customers.

Banking and finance have a lot of consumer data and profiling to deal with. One such institution is Wells Fargo that is serving more than 70 million individuals, and managing their databases. Acknowledging the fact that many of its customers are using multiple banks, they decided to go the extra mile to build their connection with their customers and started using Social CRM. This worked wonderfully for them as all of their filtered leads got instantly serviced through the CRM Software and turned into their happy customers. So much so that the head of Wells Fargo Wholesale Service Group was quoted saying that they see cloud as the future to help businesses connect to their customers around the world, not just to the services but to even build products and make for risk management strategies.

10. CRM & Sales Reports

You can build numerous reports with CRM tools and have a perfect overview of your company's performance.

In a click of a button, you can view reports as summaries, tables, matrix, and even in different visual charts as per your needs. There are multiple layout options in your top CRM software app. You can also customize your dashboard to keep monitoring your important graphs.

Not only that, but you can also share these reports with your teammates, in only a few clicks by turning the visual into a PDF, XLS, or CSV attachment.

11. Mobile Edition

Here the power of best CRM software gets manifested with the sheer brilliance of mobility. You can access your Online CRM Software on your mobile, with or without connectivity, wherever you go and whenever you want. You can configure your mobile device (Smartphone or tablet) to be able to view the most important information at all times on your customized dashboard. Mobile customers work faster, generating searches, reports, action et al...much faster than other peers. The swiftest way to manage your team is to use the mobile edition of the best CRM solutions for small businesses and make way for more brilliance.

12. Cloud / On-Demand (SaaS)

Software now uses the cloud-hosted delivery method vis-à-vis the traditional "on-premise installation". SaaS technology allows hosted delivery or cloud computing and lets businesses gain a rented "anytime anywhere" access to their most popular CRM systems. Most business leaders are going for cloud computing and the shift in CRM management (best CRM management software) has been an organic one. The prime benefit of the SaaS model is that it charges the business based on other than this benefit, there are faster implementations with contract lock-ins, improved uptime, 24/7 support, and increased return on investment.

Customer Relations’ are the most critical for the life of any business. Delayed assistance, unhandled emails, unresponsive helpdesks, etc could lead to a dent in customer relations, loss of customer trust, and subsequently lead generation. This is where keeping up to date with the latest market trends becomes important. A proper study and research about the latest trends is imperative for succeeding in any industry. Keeping this fact in mind, below are some notable latest trends in Sales Customer Relationship Management software industry:

1. The advent of Social CR

Human beings are social animals, and since consumers are also human beings, they love interacting with each other. With the popularity and spread of social media, there is perhaps not a single day when people haven’t interacted with someone. According to a recent survey, around 50% of consumers use social media for making purchase decisions. This being a crucial factor, social easy CRM software has emerged as a must-have for businesses. The customer support module of the software should be prompt and socially active as it is seen that socially active customer support desks drastically increase customer loyalty and customer retention.

2. The rapid growth of Cloud CRM Tool

It shouldn't be surprising to know that nowadays more businesses are opting for Cloud CRM solutions. Apart from affordable pricing, these solutions are flexible, updated regularly, easily maintained. And businesses are keenly adapting to employee requirements and quicker consumer assistance. Cloud Saas largest CRM software typically serves all the above benefits. Add to that, precise consumer statistics, regular feedback and real-time analytics are some other remarkable benefits of this latest CRM system trend.

3. Integration at its peak

A single software package for all departments makes business tasks smoother and seamless. Integrating best sales CRM software with all departments is much time saving and cost-efficient. Apart from that, the management of such a compact business system is very efficient and error-free. The hefty burden of accounting, sales monitoring, customer relations, purchase requisites, email campaigns and the like could be reduced to a far extent. An ideal automated system is the one where ERP and CRM function simultaneously in business, leaving no room for extra sweat. This sort of integration is the latest rage among CRM system software prospects.

4. CRM Predictions using Analytical Statistics

Online CRM software business is being coupled with real-time analytical statistics data for predicting consumer trends and behavioral moves. And by peeping into this data along with larger business purchase and sales trend data, the advanced CRM tools have become ideal in predicting sales points and positively affecting the sales funnel. The business could capitalize on this latest trend and generate more leads.

5. Better Customer Experience

Every customer looks for a human touch, and they find it missing in online business. This is exactly where brick and mortar business scores over online business. A rising trend in best online CRM software is to establish peer-to-peer relations with customers and make them feel part of the business. This relieves the customers’ craving for having human relations, subsequently enhancing the business and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).

6. Inclusion of Content Marketing Software into CRM

Content marketing is no new word in online business. Building consumer trust and generating online sales is synonymous with content marketing. Personalizing dynamic emails and landing pages through the best online CRM systems is crucial for nurturing leads and landing more sales. One of the latest trends is to integrate content marketing into famous CRM software/Customer Manager Software. This helps the marketing and sales teams to customize their marketing strategy by using customer feedback and statistics made available by the best business CRM solutions. The same data can be capitalized in the content strategy. This induces a higher probability of generation of leads and potential sales!

All business firms strive to interact with their customers, streamlining their services. In order to deliver steadfast services, they use a top CRM system to manage customer information. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, a vital aspect for any business firm. No company wants to stain the relationship with their customers.

With the digitization of information, it has become increasingly necessary to tackle vast loads of information using the software. You can monitor the calls, chats, emails, purchases, and other details of your customers using various most popular CRM tools. Today, companies are integrating these tools on their platforms to develop a seamless customer relationship management system for small business.