CRM Platforms: How They Work & Best Software For 2024

When it comes to customer relationship management (CRM), the best platforms can help strengthen your customer relationships and build customer loyalty. Businesses are always looking for ways to improve their customer relationships, and with the right CRM software, sales and marketing teams can move items directly into a CRM workflow and get things done.

Accordingly, CRMs of today have evolved to become much more than Salesforce Automation tools. Enterprise CRMs act as a bridge between marketing, sales, and service teams on a common platform allowing your customers to have seamless experiences with your brand.

What are CRM platforms?

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a technology for managing all your company’s relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers. The goal is simple: Improve business relationships. CRM platforms help companies stay connected to customers, streamline processes, and improve profitability.

CRM software helps you focus on your organisation’s relationships with individual people — including customers, service users, colleagues, or suppliers — throughout your lifecycle with them, including finding new customers, winning their business, and providing support and additional services throughout the relationship.

With a CRM solution, the sales and marketing team can track and follow a customer’s interaction journey with your business. This can enhance the customer journey and experience by refining each customer touchpoint. It connects all the data from your sales leads and customers, all in one place. It also consolidates all communications (form fills, calls, emails, text messages and meetings), documents, quotes, purchases and tasks associated with each lead and client.

As a result, your entire team can access those details at the right time — to close a sale or deliver outstanding service.

CRM software for small businesses replaces the multitude of spreadsheets, databases and apps that many businesses patch together to track client data. The result: organization, efficiency, better time management and impressed clients.

What do CRM platforms do?

Contact management is the core function of any customer information system, including CRM software. The purpose of a CRM is to store and manage all data for every kind of contact — from leads to business partners.

A spreadsheet is great if you have under 100 contacts or you’re only tracking static info like name, email address, phone number, company name, website, etc. However, it can’t compete with a CRM in tracking more complex, dynamic data, like what emails a contact has opened, what pages they’ve visited on your website or their last purchase date. Your CRM is always updating automatically as your leads and customers take action, while data in a spreadsheet becomes stale the second you stop manually adding to it.

The best CRM software shows how hot or cold a lead is, thanks to lead scoring. Based on the rules you set, points are added to a lead record for important actions your lead takes (like submitting a form or clicking a link), so your sales team can identify the hottest leads to focus on.

However, CRMs aren’t designed to help with backend operations like production, warehousing, shipping, engineering or finance. Also, they can’t manage what they can’t see. So if people work leads or deals outside the system, that lowers its effectiveness for the whole team.

Certain CRM software are used for data management only. However, an all-in-one CRM system like Keap also offers important features like sales and marketing automation, landing pages, quotes and invoicing to help entrepreneurs manage their entire businesses more efficiently.

10 best CRM platforms for you to use

Freshsales

Freshsales gives you everything you need to accelerate your revenue with context-driven sales. It helps streamline your sales processes from lead generation and prospecting to driving deals to closure and maintaining good relationships with your customers.

Here’s a quick overview of the essential features that Freshsales offers:

Contact management. Gain all the information about your contacts in one comprehensive screen. This includes a chronological timeline of interactions you’ve had across email, chat, phone, SMS, and website forms, helping salespeople understand the customer journey.
Intelligent workflows. Automate repetitive tasks and the most complex business processes effortlessly, reduce manual dependency, and save time to sell more
Pipeline management. Customize pipelines unique to your sales process and visualize deals progressing through different stages. Create multiple pipelines based on the sales team. Assign probability across stages, track your deals’ conversion and forecast revenue.
Email management. Connect your inbox and Freshsales with two-way email sync and send emails right from within the CRM. Send personalized bulk emails, schedule emails, create email templates, track email metrics, and receive real-time email alerts without shifting multiple tabs.
Live chat and chatbot. Route inbound queries to the right salespeople, create FAQs about the topics your customers ask about the most to help them self-serve, automate chat conversations with chatbots, and customize the chat box to reflect your branding

Google Sheets

Google Sheets is a web-based spreadsheet editor to collaborate on fresh data through sharing and real-time editing. You can create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations right in your browser, and they’ll be saved automatically to your Google Drive. As part of Google Workspace, teams can speed up workflows by connecting Sheets to other Google apps for a custom solution.

A spreadsheet is the most familiar way to track customer relations. You can create a table with the customer’s name, contact information, and any notes you have about the customer. This will help you keep track of communications and any customer interactions you have had. Additionally, you can use a spreadsheet to create sales reports or track inventory levels.

GoHighLevel

GoHighLevel is the best all-in-one CRM platform designed for digital marketers, business owners, and agencies of all sizes. The platform offers a range of tools to help businesses manage their customer relationships, streamline their marketing efforts, and automate their sales processes.

GoHighLevel’s intuitive interface and user-friendly design make it easy for businesses to manage their sales funnel, track leads, and automate their marketing campaigns.

It also comes with a white-label feature through which agencies can customize and resell the software to their clients and keep 100% of the profit.

Features:

Lead capture and management. GoHighLevel provides tools for capturing leads and managing them within the platform. This includes features like lead forms, lead scoring, and lead nurturing.
Appointment scheduling. The platform enables businesses to schedule appointments and automate reminders to ensure appointments are not missed. It also offers tools for tracking appointment history and performance.
Text messaging and call tracking. GoHighLevel has built-in text messaging and call tracking features that allow businesses to communicate with customers easily.
Email marketing and automation. With GoHighLevel, businesses can create and automate email campaigns, track open and click rates, and analyze campaign performance.
Sales funnel building and management. GoHighLevel provides tools for building and managing sales funnels, including drag-and-drop funnel building and funnel analytics.
CRM and project management. The platform includes a CRM system that enables businesses to manage customer data and a project management system that helps businesses track tasks and projects.
White Label SaaS. This feature allows you to customize the entire GoHighLevel software with your branding and sell it to your customers while keeping the entire profit.
Analytics and reporting. GoHighLevel offers in-depth analytics and reporting features that allow businesses to track key metrics and analyze performance.

Zendesk Sell

Zendesk Sell offers a modern CRM system that’s easy to set up and use, no matter the size of your business. It’s packed with a ton of CRM tools that help your teams maximize revenue by boosting productivity, processes, and pipeline visibility. It also has a user-friendly mobile app that synchronizes with the desktop experience, so your sales team won’t miss a beat when out in the field.

The email intelligence tool allows for seamless tracking of all email communication and helps sales reps work more efficiently, thanks to real-time push notifications, activity reporting, and email template automation. Its power dialer allows reps to make calls without lifting a finger, logs and records every call and provides access to scripts, notes, and out-of-the-box call analytics. Businesses can easily keep tabs on call count, duration, and results.

Sell also comes equipped with sales prospecting functionality that takes advantage of an untapped market of over 200 million professionals. Companies of all sizes use Sell to identify prospects and create targeted lists full of verified, robust, and accurate records.

Overall, the intuitive and customizable interface means less hair-pulling: Your team can quickly learn how to use all the powerful sales CRM features.

HubSpot

HubSpot is a powerful CRM solution providing inbound marketing and sales software, services, and education. It offers a wide range of software to help businesses with their marketing and sales efforts, including HubSpot CRM, HubSpot Marketing, and HubSpot Sales. HubSpot also has a built-in analytics system providing users with insights on how their marketing campaigns are performing.

The biggest disadvantage of using multiple CRMs is your team has to double their efforts to keep the information up to date. With a CRM platform like Hubspot, you’re able to easily manage interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle under one roof.

The HubSpot CRM can help position sales teams to improve customer engagement, increase sales, and optimize their marketing efforts. There are different functions available to help manage your customer relationships. You can use the website to create a contact list, track interactions with customers, and send out automated emails.

Pipedrive

Pipedrive is a sales pipeline management tool that helps businesses keep track of their sales cycle and progress. It’s an accessible cloud-based solution from any device, making it ideal for companies with remote sales teams. Pipedrive offers a variety of features such as customizable pipelines, sales, email integration, and activity tracking.

A sales pipeline is a visual representation of your sales process. It helps you track opportunities through each stage of the sales cycle, from prospect to customer. Pipedrive makes it easy to set up a customizable pipeline in three easy steps:

1. Set up your pipeline by adding your deals or importing them automatically from a spreadsheet or CRM

2. Track progress from automatic alerts and reminders to keep deals on track

3. Automate growth with AI technology to help you identify opportunities to close more sales

Microsoft Dynamics

Microsoft Dynamics is a line of business software applications offered by Microsoft. It covers various aspects of a business, from financials and operations to sales and marketing. Dynamics is designed to help organizations manage their finances, operations, sales and marketing, and customer service.

Operational CRM helps businesses with a wide range of activities like tracking customer data, automating sales processes, and managing interactions. But at its core, operational CRM improves customer service by providing agents with customer information, including past interactions and orders.

By tracking customer interactions and data in CRM software like Microsoft Dynamics, businesses better understand what customers need and want, and how to best serve them. This information can also help businesses identify at-risk customers and take steps to retain them. CRM software can make this process easier by automating many tasks related to tracking and managing customer data.

ClickUp

ClickUp makes it easy to organize and grow your customer relationships with data visualizations, marketing automation, communications, and more—all in one place. The features and tools are fully customizable so cross-functional teams like Marketing, Support Engineers, and Finance can leverage ClickUp to manage their tasks and help close deals faster.

ClickUp’s features help increase sales and marketing efforts so everyone has the information they need when they need it. The results? Better team relationships and quicker task hand-offs to deliver a coordinated customer experience.

Here are other ways to leverage ClickUp:

Customize your ClickUp Workspace so teams and sales reps have the flexibility to view data in multiple ways
Reduce the number of tabs and apps opened with ClickUp’s native and third-party integrations
Eliminate silos and fast-track communication by integrating your emails with ClickUp
Automate sales processes, reminders, follow-ups, and other time-consuming tasks
Access ClickUp from any device whether you’re in the office or on-the-go
Set up CRM templates for client deliverables and sales processes
Build a sales forecasting model with historical data

Keap

Keap is a cloud-based CRM software that enables small businesses to manage their customer interactions and automate their sales, marketing, and customer service activities all in one place. It provides a centralized platform for businesses to store customer data and track their interactions with customers, making it easier to manage and improve customer relationships.

It also offers tools and resources tailored specifically to the needs of small businesses. This includes lead management, appointment scheduling, and automated follow-up reminders.

Keap also offers integrations with popular third-party applications like Zapier and QuickBooks, allowing businesses to streamline their workflows and automate repetitive tasks.

BIGContacts

BIGContacts is a cloud-based contact management system for businesses to store, manage, and share their contacts with others in a secure environment. With BIGContacts, users can connect with colleagues, customers, and partners more effectively by having instant access to all of their contact information in one place. Additionally, BIGContacts offers a variety of features such as contact sharing, birthday reminders, and custom filters that help users stay organized and connected.

Contact management is more than just keeping track of names and email addresses. It’s about creating a system that helps you stay in touch with your contacts, keeps them organized, and makes it easy for you to find the information you need when you need it. Here are a few actions you can take to customize your BigContacts interface:

Use custom fields to store any additional information about your prospects and customers important to your business
Sort and view contacts by pending or upcoming activity, opportunity, last contact, or last communication
Create users, roles, and permissions to manage your teams
View updated email communication from one place

If you’re a small business needing a comfortable CRM system without the complexities, BIGContacts was designed to meet these needs.

Systeme.io

Systeme.io is an all-in-one business platform that provides entrepreneurs and businesses with tools for creating and managing online courses, sales funnels, membership websites, and email marketing campaigns.

By providing a comprehensive set of tools, Systeme.io enables businesses to manage their customer relationships and grow their business through effective marketing and sales strategies.

Systeme.io has a user-friendly interface, which makes it easy for businesses to manage their customer data and track customer interactions.

Benefits of CRM platforms

Boost sales

A CRM can help you identify, nurture, and follow up on quality leads. This means that you don’t waste time and resources on a prospect that probably won’t become a customer. Combined with a reduced sales cycle, you can guide more leads more efficiently and convert them to happy customers in a considerably shorter time.

Efficient business process

Help your team stay productive by defining and building efficient processes for your business. A CRM can help you ensure that standards are followed while processes are executed. Make sure your sales team’s time is spent on closing deals and not wasted on mundane tasks by automating routine activities.

Data security and compliance

You can rest assured that your customer data is safe in your vendor’s data centers, safeguarded by top-of-the-line physical and digital security mechanisms. If you’re based in the European Union or do business with European customers, CRM platforms that offer GDPR-compliance features will be your greatest assets.

Tactical decision-making

Accurate data from across your organization helps keep your decision makers informed, so they can react to market trends with better decisions. Detailed reports will show how your teams are performing and where there’s room for improvement.

Mobile accessibility

A CRM with a mobile app ensures that your team has access to important CRM data, no matter where they are. A sales rep in the field can pull up information about nearby customers, drop by for a meeting, and easily update everyone else on any new information by logging it in the CRM through their mobile app.

Customer satisfaction

A CRM arms your team with all the historical data of a customer, as well as information regarding similar issues faced by others. A centralized repository of information helps your team resolve customer inquiries quickly, ensuring they leave satisfied.

Importance of CRM platforms for your business

CRM software is increasing in importance as it is the largest and fastest-growing enterprise application software category. Worldwide spending on CRM is expected to reach USD $114.4 billion by 2027. If your business is going to last, you need a strategy for the future that’s centred around your customers and enabled by the right technology. You have targets for sales, business objectives, and profitability. However, getting up-to-date, reliable information on your progress can be tricky.

How do you translate the many streams of data coming in from sales, customer service, marketing, and social media monitoring into useful business information?

A CRM system can give you a clear overview of your customers. You can see everything in one place — a simple, customisable dashboard that can tell you a customer’s previous history with you, the status of their orders, any outstanding customer service issues, and more. You can even choose to include information from their public social media activity — their likes and dislikes, what they are saying and sharing about you or your competitors.

Marketers can use a CRM solution to manage and optimise campaigns and lead journeys with a data-driven approach, and better understand the pipeline of sales or prospects coming in, making forecasting simpler and more accurate. You’ll have clear visibility of every opportunity or lead, showing you a clear path from inquiries to sales.

Some of the biggest gains in productivity and in making a whole-company shift to customer-centricity can come from moving beyond CRM as just a sales and marketing tool and embedding it in your business — from finance to customer services and supply chain management. This helps to ensure that customer needs are at the forefront of business processes and innovation cycles.

CRM Platforms: How They Work & Best Software For 2024

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What are CRM platforms?

What do CRM platforms do?