With customer relationship management (CRM) systems, you can manage your customer data across every part of your business.

Many of these systems provide insight into customer buying patterns, preferences, and experiences with a business—all of which can be useful for fostering loyalty, trust, and a great individualized relationship with each client.

Most also allow employees to enter reminders for follow-ups and organize the actions that need to be taken to win over a prospect’s business or ensure that a customer remains satisfied with a brand.

Some can also assist with sales forecasting by helping you understand your business's pipelines and how close one of your sales representatives is to reaching a sales goal.

Customer relationship management systems are a must-have for every business, but there are many factors to consider before making your selection. Be sure to study upfront and ongoing costs, security features, ease of access from mobile and desktop devices, and availability of backup or recovery plans that will help you ensure the valuable information you capture is safe, secure, and retrievable.

Ready to explore your options? Below, you’ll find our preferred picks.

Keap

Formerly known as Infusionsoft, Keap offers a range of tools that can help you optimize your business, but here, we want to focus specifically on its CRM.

Keap's easy-to-use CRM tool can help you auto-capture and organize your leads, manage client follow-ups, and automate important client tasks, including follow-ups that can lead to more conversions. With this tool, you can also set up a repeatable sales process that makes every sale a breeze.

Keap is big on customization. This tool allows you to create custom lead forms, landing pages, invoices, and flows to simplify your operations.

We like that Keap plays well with other tools. With thousands of possible integrations—and easy migrations from a few big-name customer relationship management systems—Keap's a great tool for staying productive and efficient.

You can choose from three Keap packages to serve the specific needs of your business. The Lite package, which doesn't include all the features we mention here, starts at $79/month for one user with 500 contacts, though you can often receive some short-term promo pricing. Keap's more advanced plans, which are available for $85/month and up, are more robust. They offer customized landing pages, lead scoring, sales pipelines, A/B email testing, text messaging broadcasts, subscription management, advanced automation, and analytics that may be important for your business.

Visit Keap’s website to learn more about their solutions, view a demo, and connect with their sales team.

HubSpot

HubSpot offers an outstanding cloud-based platform for syncing up your marketing, sales, and customer service teams. This platform includes five hubs you might use to improve every part of marketing and sales efforts.

Together, the hubs support lead generation, automation, analytics, scheduling, payments, a collection of customer feedback, a knowledge base, and much more. What's great is that this tool is an all-in-one option that can help you navigate your inbound and outbound customer needs.

Lots of owners are drawn to HubSpot because of their free CRM solution and assortment of free apps and tools that can truly add value. With these, you can generate a marketing plan, find blog ideas, build landing pages and online forms, and equip your website with live chat.

For sales automation, customizable reports, and tools like email sequences and smart send times, you'll need to level up to HubSpot's premium package.

Pricing starts at around $45 for a streamlined version of the tool and increases with the number of marketing contacts you need to support and the addition of some of their best-in-class features. Keep in mind that, with some plans costing tens of thousands of dollars a year, HubSpot can become very expensive very quickly. You can compare the different tiers of solutions on HubSpot's website.

Interested in a free demo of HubSpot? Get started here.

Zoho CRM

Most popular with businesses already using Zoho software, Zoho CRM offers a set of solutions that can help you and your team manage your customers and score your leads across multiple pipelines.

Zoho CRM has robust salesforce and marketing automation, tools to improve and automate processes, forecasting and predictive technologies, and analytics. More than 250,000 businesses rely on these tools to improve their conversion rates, bolster their customer engagement, and grow their revenue.

Zoho offers a free edition of their CRM, but many owners opt for the feature-rich paid solution the company offers. Plans start at $14/month per user for the standard plan.

You can learn more about Zoho CRM solutions and view a complete side-by-side comparison of their products by visiting Zoho's website.

Zoho One

When we mention Zoho products, we often like to talk about Zoho One, an all-in-one tool that helps owners run their businesses efficiently and effectively.

Zoho One includes the CRM we mention here plus bookkeeping, HR, marketing, social media, and many other high-performing tools that integrate well with one another.

If you consider Zoho CRM, look into Zoho One, a solution that starts at around $37/month per employee. You can learn more about Zoho One here.

What's next?

Interested in other small business solutions? Let us help you find the right systems. Then, log into your owner’s portal for more articles and advice tailored to your business’s needs.