Best CRM for Startups — Top 5 for 2022

Good customer relationships are hugely important for startups. These companies are in the process of establishing their brand on the market and so can really benefit from top CRM software that can store your contacts, manage and keep accounts up-to-date, track customer behavior, generate customer data reports, and more.

 

However, it can be tricky to work out which is the best CRM for your fledgling business. Luckily, we’re here to help — we’ve tested the top CRM tools to bring you our top 5 CRM tools for startups based on criteria including ease of use, workflow automation tools, lead management features, pricing, and more.

 

Startup CRM Software: Top 5 for 2022

CRM software is one of the key tools modern businesses use to operate more efficiently and make more sales. As the popularity of these solutions grew, providers flooded the market with all sorts of CRM offerings.

 

However, our extensive research and analysis found that only  a small selection of these platforms are a great fit for startups and make our list of the top 10 best CRMs for startups:

  1. Salesforce — Best CRM for startups overall
  2. Pipedrive — Top CRM for sales startups
  3. Monday Sales CRM — CRM software with the best customizable features
  4. Zoho CRM — Best CRM for B2B startups
  5. Freshsales — No. 1 CRM for scaling SMEs

 

Best Startup CRM Software — Reviewed

So, that’s the list but let’s discuss why these solutions deserve to be a part of it. Below, we’ve thoroughly explored each provider, analyzing their main features, pros and cons, and pricing.

 

Armed with this info, you’ll be perfectly placed to work out which is the right CRM for your startup.

 

  1. Salesforce — Best CRM System for Startups Overall

Salesforce is the best CRM for startups overallSalesforce is one of the world’s most widely used CRM solutions, having grown into a juggernaut that serves huge companies like Walmart, Amazon, Toyota and American Express since it launched in 1999.

 

Salesforce’s high customizability and scalability, advanced account and contact management features, and great integrations will keep your customer relations running smoothly and help your startup achieve its business ambitions.

 

Key Features:

 

  • Scalability — Salesforce includes several features that support the growth of your business, including an easy-to-use interface and a highly flexible layout. Your team quickly grasp how the system works quickly and be able to add and delete tabs and panels, use templates for email and reports, customize dashboards, and more.
  • Quality onboarding program — The provider ensures you and your team members have all the help you need to make the most of Salesforce. There are over 50 virtual and in-person online courses that will teach you virtually every aspect of the tool, as well as 24/7 customer support via email, live chat, and phone for 1-1 assistance.
  • Convenient automations — This CRM solution allows you to automate various workflow-related processes and work more efficiently. For example, you can auto-assign tasks, fill out orders, create proposals, update and delete records, and much more. Eliminating these repetitive tasks will let your team focus on doing what it does best — growing your business.

Pricing:

 

  • Essentials — $25/month
  • Sales Professional — $75/month
  • Service Professional — $75/month
  • Marketing Cloud Account Engagement — $1,250/month

Pros:

 

  • Easy-to-use interface and layout
  • Customizable features
  • Helpful automations
  • Advanced lead and contact management tools
  • In-depth onboarding system

Cons:

  • Limited integrations

 

Salesforce is our top overall pick for the best CRM for startups! It’s user-friendly, customizable, and packed with excellent contact management features and automations — check it out below!

 

  1. Pipedrive — Best Sales CRM for Startups

A close second on our best CRM systems for startups list is Pipedrive — an Estonian-born sales-focused CRM company with over a decade of experience and more than 100,000 users worldwide.

 

Pipedrive stands out by combining excellent CRM tools with top-notch marketing and sales features. Its superbly designed mobile apps make scheduling, taking notes, and managing accounts on the go a breeze, while its comprehensive management tools, automations, and integrations make it a favorite among startups across a variety of industries.

 

Key features:

 

  • Deal-driven workflow features — Pipedrive offers a customizable pipeline with a great drag-and-drop interface that lets you easily organize your contacts and correspondence, track employees’ progress in relation to specific deals, take notes of their achievements and mistakes, and more.
  • Outstanding mobile apps — Pipedrive’s comprehensive mobile apps keep all your customer information at hand 24/7 and enable you to make and track calls, schedule activities and take notes during meetings or calls directly from the app. The best part is that you don’t need an internet connection for many of these tasks and so you can work whenever and wherever you are.
  • Customizable lead generation tool — Pipedrive’s preprogrammed questionnaire supercharges lead generation — giving you the power to add or move customers to different pipelines, change their status, attach notes to their profiles, pull public information about prospects, and more in just a few clicks.

 

Pricing:

  • Essential — $9.90/month
  • Advanced — $19.90/month
  • Professional — $39.90/month
  • Enterprise— $59.90/month

 

Pros:

  • Straightforward and clean layout
  • Deal-driven approach to tasks
  • Feature-rich mobile apps
  • Advanced lead generation tools
  • Useful marketing and sales features

Cons:

  • List of new contacts and leads not divided

 

Running a sales business can be challenging, but our best sales CRM for startups should make it much easier. Pipedrive’s user-friendly layout and excellent mobile apps let you track the entire sales process from start to finish, no matter where you are. Click the link below and see how it could help your business.

 

  1. Monday Sales CRM — CRM Software With the Best Customizable Features

Project management powerhouse Monday.com has made a seriously impressive entry into the CRM space. This flexible solution offers advanced work management, lead scoring, and automation tools, but the real standout feature is its highly customizable interface.

 

Key features:

 

  • Easily-customizable design — Monday Sales CRM gives you the choice of several ways to view various business metrics. Once you’ve chosen a basic view, you can easily add lists, dashboards, analytics tools, and more. You can also easily access various automations and integrations to eliminate mundane tasks and streamline your business.
  • Great collaboration capabilities — Accessed via the homepage, the separate work management platform features multiple workflow views, guest access restrictions, whiteboard collaborations, time tracking, formula columns, and more. You’ll be able to assign tasks to your team members, track their progress, and stay on top of each deal.
  • Wide array of integrations — This CRM solution expands your startup’s possibilities by seamlessly integrating with Google Drive, Gmail, Microsoft Excel, Dropbox, Slack, One Drive, and loads of other popular cloud-based platforms. So, your team members can handle a huge variety of tasks without ever having to leave the app.

 

Pricing:

  • Individual — $0/month
  • Basic — $10/month
  • Standard — $14/month
  • Pro — $24/month
  • Enterprise — Available on contact

 

Pros:

  • Highly customizable features
  • Excellent collaboration tools
  • Advanced lead capturing and scoring system
  • Plenty of integrations
  • Free plan

 

Cons:

Limited seats and features in lower-range pricing plans

Monday Sales CRM’s highly customizable features, great lead-generating and scoring capabilities, and huge range of integration means it’s a great fit for all sorts of startups. Try it out now and see what it could do for your SME.

 

  1. Zoho CRM — Best CRM for B2B Startups

Zoho is a famous software provider that serves over 250,000 customers in around 180 countries. Its CRM product was engineered to keep all B2B businesses’ needs fulfilled. The platform offers a roster of features that keep stakeholders, partners, and vendors connected and allow them to access and stay up to date on deals, reports, and payments.

 

On top of that, its analytics keep track of your startup’s progress and make coping with the ever-changing business climate easier.

 

Key features:

 

  • Enhanced lead management tools — Zoho allows you to recognize, capture, nurture, and follow up on leads. Its unified inbox enables you to communicate with these customers through various channels, from telephone and live chat to emails and social media. It even provides historical data on each of your leads, helping your team make better decisions and improve their performance in the long run.
  • Robust analytics — This CRM tool’s analytics features pull data from various sources and coordinate it through specialized data connectors. They structure and organize essential information and create useful reports. Regular reports will help your team gain insight into their work, recognize productivity gaps, and avoid future mistakes.
  • Great process management features — Zoho’s features can help your startup stay on top of the latest industry trends. They analyze and prioritize leads and deals, group customers according to shared characteristics, initiate targeted surveys, enable you to set realistic goals for your business, and more.

 

Pricing:

  • Standard — $14/month
  • Professional — $23/month
  • Enterprise — $40/month
  • Ultimate — $52/month

 

Pros:

  • Effective lead management tools
  • Powerful analytics
  • Impressive process management features
  • Integrations with Zoho and other business-related apps
  • Affordable plans

 

Cons:

  • Steep learning curve

 

Zoho CRM is an end-to-end platform packed with features that can help users build positive relationships with B2B customers.

 

It offers excellent lead and process management tools, fantastic analytics and reports, and numerous useful integrations. Thanks to its free plan, you can try it risk-free right now!

 

  1. Freshsales — No. 1 CRM for Scaling SMEs

Freshsales is a CRM solution from the widely-used Freshworks suite of products. Launched in 2016, the software has already made a name for itself in the competitive business realm. Freshsales’ many helpful contact, deal, and project management features make it an excellent platform for startups focused on scaling.

 

Key features:

  • AI-powered sales cycle — Freshsales software features an advanced AI assistant that makes lead generation easy as pie. It makes predictions, provides insights and offers recommendations based on your business’s performance and needs. For example, it attends to all website visitors, recognizes hot and cold prospects, gives heads up on deals that will likely close, automates mundane tasks, and more.
  • Extensive built-in communication tools — This CRM platform facilitates customer communication by offering several communication channels. You can use in-app phone, live chat, email, and Zoom meeting options to connect with prospects effortlessly. These functions are also part of the Freshsales mobile app, so you can also work on the move.
  • Detailed email features — Freshsales allows you to sync your email platform with its software. It offers various email templates to facilitate customer correspondence and enables you to set up email sales sequence workflows effortlessly. Your reps will even be able to work in the sales email inbox simultaneously and exchange ideas and options along the way.

Pricing:

  • Free — $0/month
  • Growth — $15/month
  • Pro — $39/month
  • Enterprise — $69/month

 

Pros:

  • AI-driven sales process
  • Powerful communication tools
  • Useful email features
  • Great salesforce automations
  • Free plan

 

Cons:

  • Lower-range plans lack important features

If scaling is your top priority, Freshsales is a must. Its sales pipeline and contact management, built-in communication tools, and salesforce automations are only a few reasons why you’ll love it. Check it out to see what else it has to offer!

 

What Does Startup CRM Software Do?

Startup CRM software is customer relationship management software created for startups and new businesses. Its purpose is to help startup owners and their teams manage relationships with their clients most effectively and efficiently.

 

At the basic level, CRM software is a ledger that stores essential customer information, from telephone numbers to website details. Nevertheless, the best CRMs for startups are capable of much more. They can handle lead generation, lead scoring, workflow management and automation, data analysis and reporting, and more.

 

What Are the Advantages of Using Startup CRM Software?

Using CRM software has become the norm in the business world. These solutions enjoy widespread popularity because of the many benefits they bring to the table. The following sections will explain what a CRM does for your brand. Read on!

 

Refined Contact Management

There are many reasons to leverage CRM software for small businesses or startups. However, one of the most crucial is a better contact management system. The best CRM tools for startups keep all important customer-related data in one place and systemize it most efficiently. They also track and record all customer correspondence, from calls to emails, and make it accessible to your entire team at all times.

 

Increased Productivity and Efficiency

CRM solutions can massively improve your team’s productivity and efficiency. They organize contacts, track and record meetings and calls, automate repetitive tasks, analyze customer behavior, provide reports on your business operations, and much more.  As a result, your team will have time to focus on demanding tasks, your performance will become more consistent, and your revenue will grow.

 

Enhanced Collaboration

CRM platforms feature tools that facilitate communication with both colleagues and customers. They offer a variety of communication tools and features that allows your team members to exchange ideas and opinions, help each other with tasks, find solutions to problems, and so on.

 

Furthermore, they let you keep in touch with your customers, track their satisfaction with your services and products, and respond to their needs more efficiently.

 

Improved Customer Satisfaction

“How you can measure and improve customer satisfaction” is one of the most relevant questions in the business world. However, with the best CRM for startups, it doesn’t have to be a problem. These solutions track and analyze customer behavior and generate reports on it.

 

They can provide you and your team with an insight into your customers’ needs and wishes and help you cater to them most effectively. In turn, customers will have more motivation to remain loyal to your business in the long run.

 

Conclusion: What Is the Best CRM for Startups?

The right startup CRM software can do wonders for a new business. These systems can help capture leads, establish a relationship with them, automate menial tasks, improve workflow, and more. As a result, your startup can enjoy more organized contact management, improved productivity and collaboration, better customer satisfaction, and boosted revenue.

 

If you like the sound of that (and who wouldn’t), you’ll be happy to know you won’t have to struggle to choose the best CRM for your business needs.

 

Our research found that Salesforce is clearly the best CRM for startups. It boasts an intuitive UI, a customizable layout, high scalability, advanced contact and account management tools, numerous integrations, and loads. Check out the free trial now to see what it can do!