Customer relationship management software can help manage every interaction and profit more.
No matter what type of business you’re running, building and maintaining a good relationship with your customers is the key to lasting results. When you employ one of the best CRM examples in your business, you can keep your customers happy while converting more leads faster.
Customer relationship management (CRM) is best defined as a strategy for managing your customer interactions with the goal of increasing profits and customer loyalty. In most cases, CRM strategies can be used across all customer-facing teams—from marketing to sales—to help you get better results for your entire organization. As your company grows, you may find that investing in a digital CRM solution is the best way to save time and money and enhance your long-term growth.
Keep reading below to learn more about CRM software and find the right CRM solution for you.
Benefits of CRM software
While customer relationship management itself isn’t a technology, most business owners use the term “CRM” in reference to a software that helps you manage your customers and leads. This software is now a core part of many companies’ daily operations due to all the benefits it provides.
The reason most business owners choose to employ a CRM system is to create a central space for all customer data. Within this system, your teams can quickly get valuable insight into each member of your growing audience in the same space—all before they reach out or respond. This is an easy way to streamline and even automate your marketing, customer support, and sales processes while keeping all data in a secure place.
CRM software doesn’t just help you behind the scenes. It’s also proven to improve customer retention by as much as 27%. This is because the software helps you cater all of your communications to each stakeholder—based on demographics, purchase history, and more—for a better customer experience.
This software can even help you set up marketing automation to follow up with inactive and potential customers, so you never let a lead slip by. For your current customers, this technology balances personalization and automation. You can save time while reaching out on important dates (like birthdays and membership anniversaries) and sending thank you messages or surveys after purchases. In the end, this leads to greater customer satisfaction and a more personable brand.
As your customers develop an emotional connection to your brand, thanks to your use of CRMs, each person can have as much as 306% higher lifetime value.
3 best CRM software examples
In order to select the best CRM system for your business needs, you’ll want to consider some of the top picks for companies around the world—which may include some of your competitors. Below, we’ll run through three great CRM examples and how they work.
As you’re shopping for CRMs, don’t be taken aback by the cost. Your system may be a big investment at first, but the average return on investment (ROI) is as much as $8.71 for every dollar spent.
1. HubSpot
HubSpot provides one of the most trusted CRM tools in the industry. Many businesses start out and continue to stay on HubSpot CRM because it’s a robust, easy-to-learn tool fit for any department that remains 100% free forever—no catch. Free HubSpot CRM features include:
- Unlimited users and data: You can store unlimited amounts of valuable data for up to a million contacts and give access to as many team members as you’d like. HubSpot’s CRM software even automatically populates data in each data listing, based on information they have in their massive database.
- Helpful integrations: You can connect to over 300 third-part business tools, including Zapier, Gmail, Outlook, Google Calendar, and many productivity tools. You can also place calls directly within the CRM system. You can also export data from Hubspot to google sheets, with such tools as Coupler.io and etc.
- Email campaign management: You can create bulk emails on HubSpot, personalized with stored data about your customer base and leads. You can also review analytics, including open rates and click-through rates.
2. Salesforce
Salesforce is a software as a service (SaaS) platform that offers one of the first and most comprehensive modern CRM solutions today. The company is best known for its essential CRM system, which is integrated into its Sales Cloud product and offers:
- Contact management: Any approved user in your organization can quickly store and retrieve customer information, which helps ensure that every department can contribute to your company’s top-notch service. Team members can even integrate customer data with Gmail or Outlook.
- Automation: When your sales team notices that they’re constantly repeating a certain step, they can save time by setting up a Salesforce automation for it.
- Lead management: Salesforce’s CRM helps you capture leads from your website and automatically scores them to help you spend time on the right leads.
- Sales tracking: You can get a real-time look at where your customers are in the sales cycle and how your sales team is performing.
Accessible straight through the cloud from pretty much any device, Salesforce’s CRM tool is also notable for its ability to be molded to businesses of any size. A basic plan is both manageable and affordable for small businesses at $25 per user per month. As your business scales, you can upgrade to Professional and Enterprise plans and even a much larger Unlimited plan. You can additionally set up your Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud for further CRM solutions catered to each department.
3. Zoho
Rounding out our list of great CRM examples is Zoho, another top-rated customer relationship management software that thousands of businesses are choosing. Zoho CRM offers some of the most affordable paid plans on our list, which include the following features at the most basic level:
- Diverse integrations: Zoho is notable for providing a large amount of integrations with communication channels at its most affordable tier. While options above may offer phone, email, and live chat integrations, Zoho CRM also helps you chat with leads and contacts on leading social media channels.
- Flexible layouts: Not every business needs the same information from each customer, so a big draw of Zoho is its highly customizable layouts, which can be cloned in seconds.
- Automated workflows: You can build workflows that trigger emails, notifications, and task assignments when the conditions you set are met. You can also set conditions that your sales reps need to meet before closing a deal with a new customer.
- KPI tracking: Zoho CRM helps you track a variety of key performance indicators (KPIs) so you’ll know what changes are needed early on.
When your business grows, you can upgrade from the Standard plan—priced at $12 per user per month—to a monthly Professional or Enterprise plan, or a yearly Ultimate Edition plan. This allows you to gain more powerful email marketing tools, inventory management tools, and advanced customization to make automating easier.
Enhance your CRM with Webchat
Investing in and strategically using one of the CRM examples above will help you streamline your business processes and keep your customers loyal to your brand. However, there’s more you can do to convert your leads.
Adding Podium Webchat to your CRM strategy can help you accelerate your lead generation by sending warm inbound leads straight to your CRM software.
Webchat adds a simple button to your website that takes note of the names and phone numbers of visitors when they send a message. Then, the contact information of leads with the greatest potential are automatically added saved in your CRM tool. This allows your team to continue the conversation and develop a lasting relationship.
