A CRM that plays nice with your other apps is key. How do you improve if you can't measure how you're doing? Any good CRM system for small business will provide a set of reports to help you do just that. As the center of your customer data and sales productivity, your CRM will help you keep track of contacts and activity, and see how your deals are moving forward with a visual sales pipeline. I looked for small business CRM systems that you can set up quickly, that offer easy ways to access help content when you need it, and that are simple to use every day. With that in mind, here's what I looked for as I was testing the best customer relationship management software for small business: Lastly, you need a tool that gives you visibility and control over your business processes, so your team can get the insights they need. At the same time, the subscription price needs to fit your budget as you grow, starting at a fair enough point on the lowest plan, and keeping a reasonable scale for the advanced features that you get on the higher plans. And since all your data is centered here, you can take a look at reports to find opportunities to improve.īut what's important in client relationship management software for small business, in particular? You don't want a tool that's too basic, too focused on the CRM side of things-something that will limit you later on, forcing a switch. It helps you be productive by letting you know what to do next and coordinating your sales team. It contains all the data about leads and deals you're building for them, complete with a timeline of past and planned interactions. For more details on our process, read the full rundown of how we select apps to feature on the Zapier blog.Ī CRM is one of the core sales apps in your tech stack. We're never paid for placement in our articles from any app or for links to any site-we value the trust readers put in us to offer authentic evaluations of the categories and apps we review. Unless explicitly stated, we spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as it's intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the category. Our best apps roundups are written by humans who've spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software.