Creating relationships has never been more important for small businesses. Often sidelined by big-name companies with astronomical marketing budgets, it’s the personal touch that gives startups and SMEs the edge.
But it’s not good enough just to have a firm handshake and a warm smile. In an online environment and with potential customers all around the world, it’s no surprise leaders are turning to contact management solutions for small businesses.
With structured information on each of your clients and a range of tech features to save you time and cut out human error, contact center management solutions take care of the admin so you can focus on building strong, long-lasting relationships.
But how do you know what contact management tools are right for your business?
To find out, this article will take you through the best contact management software on the market today. Each stands out in its own way, so you can peruse the key features and settle on the right platform for you.
With a free version and paid tiers starting at under $61 per team per month (flat fee, 5 users included), Bitrix24 gives you a whole lot of bang for your buck. With pipeline tracking, contact reporting, traffic analysis, and more, data will inform all of your decisions. Sales intelligence allows you to manage ads, track each customer’s entire journey, and customize the entire system to suit your company.
As far as contact management solutions for small businesses go, Bitrix24 is unique in the quality and quantity of its features. Plan your marketing and sales workflows meticulously on the extensive project management software, complete with agile visualizations and task automation to cut out those pesky time-wasting elements. Then launch automated marketing campaigns, open up a call center, and reach out to your customers across any communication channel you can think of.
At just $5 per user per month, it’s BIG by name, small by price tag (sorry). BIGContacts is one of the cheapest contact management solutions for small businesses and gives you access to sales workflows and pipeline tracking, a team calendar, and a few customizable fields for your database. Moving up the price brackets, you can unlock social media tracking and reporting features so you can really dig down into the details of your campaigns.
Many users are somewhat disappointed in the mobile version, which isn’t as user friendly as you might like. On the subject of phones, BIGContacts doesn’t provide much in the way of communication outside of drip email campaigns. If you need video conferencing or audio calls, this unfortunately isn’t for you.
A household name in contact center management solutions, Hubspot’s main bonus is that you can get a free customer database for unlimited users. Paid versions unlock communication tools, pipeline management, and sales automation features that can really get your business rolling. Great for organizations with aspirations of grandeur, the upper payment plans give you a super user-friendly platform that automatically enriches your data and allows you to integrate a helpdesk for your customers.
But while it is undeniably popular, Hubspot is perfectly designed to keep you wanting more, which means it can get pretty expensive pretty quickly. Hubspot’s success may lie in hooking in customers until they need to make the jump from the Starter package ($45 per month for two users) to the Professional CRM Suite, which is an eye-watering $1,600 for five users.
An offshoot of Zoho CRM, Bigin gives is one of the simpler contact management solutions for small businesses that you can integrate with a range of other apps for an all-round approach. Although it lacks customization features in the database, you can create and manage ads to pull in new leads.
Populate your CRM with customizable webform integrations that collect your data, then funnel leads into your automated workflows. At $7 per user per month, Bigin is understandably quite a minimalist platform. It focuses most on pipeline management and customer behavior analytics, which you can use to inform your interactions in the future. With some detailed work in the planning phase, the platform will segment your contacts according to their behavior and you can launch campaigns across a range of channels based on the kind of customer you want to reach.
Streak CRM has been designed to work through an integration Gmail, which is great if you’re looking for contact management solutions for small businesses and you’re already a Google user. And by all accounts, it works remarkably well. If a customer gets in touch, you automatically get an overview of their contact in your email account. As you work each lead through your pipeline, you get activity timelines so keep tabs on every past interaction as well as their behavior.
With custom fields and contact-specific task management, you can get into the nitty gritty with every interaction and receive real-time notifications to stay on top of your communications. From an internal standpoint, custom workflows standardizes your team’s strategy which is great for when you start getting an influx of customers.
At $15 per user per month, it isn’t the most expensive tool, but it doesn’t come with many native integrations. This makes it quite restrictive if you plan to spread your wings further down the line.
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As the name suggests, Pipedrive is all about making your sales pipelines as simple and user-friendly as possible. With an easy drag-and-drop interface, you can manage all your leads and track them as they pass through your multiple customer pipelines. You can segment your customers too, and target each group with different email campaigns.
While Pipedrive does offer reporting tools, many users note that they don’t go into enough detail, with competitors offering a more in-depth analysis. However, as one of the cheaper contact management solutions for small businesses at $12.50, Pipedrive still delivers.
With features such as custom fields and duplicate detection as standard, some small businesses will be eyeing Zendesk’s relatively high starting price ($19 per user per month) with a certain amount of curiosity. Lead prospecting allows you to score your contacts long before they become clients, which is a valuable asset for contact management tools. However, on the negative side, organizing and sifting through your data isn’t as easy as with other apps.
Zendesk’s workflow sequences are a favorite feature of many users. You can easily set up triggers and actions for both tasks and automated email processes that you can later track, allowing you to focus on the more human jobs. If your contact management relies more on phone calls, Zendesk provides call analytics to let you measure your team’s performance as your contacts move through your pipelines.
Monday.com is a prime example of how customization can take your team to the next level. While you might need your resident tech enthusiast to get things started, you can transform the platform into a wide range of uses and you can cover contact management solutions with ease. For every lead, you can add a bunch more detail, such as contact details, relevant documents, and related tasks, then use reporting tools to analyze your progress.
Automations are wide and varied, which lets you offset a great deal of manual work that’s usually associated with contact management. From task automations to alerts and reminders, Monday.com keeps everyone on track and reduces the workload. It is, however, quite thin on the ground when it comes to communication channels, but at $8 per user per month, it isn’t a huge investment for startups and SMEs.
While you don’t get too many customization options with Covve, users love the ability to choose the frequency of reminders you get for each individual contact. These smart notifications allow you to focus more attention on prospects and customers who are of more value to your business, while keeping weaker leads on the back burner.
Covve’s innovative business card scanning is a neat feature, but its contact update and news tool is perhaps where it excels. Get a stream of news and info related to each contact’s industry so you can communicate with them in a more informed way. With an eye on efficiency, performance tracking tools allow you to reflect on what works and what doesn’t, and change your strategy accordingly. Not bad for $9.99 a month for every user.
The grand daddy of CRM software, Salesforce is a true beast with an endless list of customizations. You’ll probably need an in-house expert to get the most out of it, but the Salesforce customer service team has a great reputation for onboarding and continued support. As you climb the price tiers, Salesforce brings the big guns out, with AI-driven sales tracking, marketing automation, and complex analytics that you can really dig down into.
Its hefty price tag, starting at $25 per user per month, removes it from many conversations about contact management solutions for small businesses. However, if you’re looking to grow your company rapidly (and secure a healthy investment), there are many worse options than preparing yourself with the CRM of choice for many multinationals.
Insightly does what it says on the tin: you get a range of insights to fully understand your customer database, making lead routing much easier. B2B businesses love how you can map out each contact’s organizational structure, giving a clearer, more personalized picture of who you’re dealing with. With automated processes and good analytics tools, managers can take a more hands-off approach in the day-to-day, and use Insightly to adapt and improve their marketing and sales strategies.
While it is great for your customer-focused tasks, Insightly does fall down slightly when it comes to internal communication and customization. This relatively user-unfriendly interface is at odds with other contact management solutions for small businesses, and with an inflated price, ($29 per user every month) Insightly could be better.
Cooper CRM is another of those contact management solutions for small businesses that integrates itself comfortably with Google Workspace. It synchronizes your apps so you never lose track of information, and task automation reduces a lot of admin for managers. What’s more, all those contact details come directly from Google, meaning you don’t even need detailed lead-capturing forms to gather data. Customize a field to sort and categorize each lead automatically and manage pipelines to personalize each interaction.
Of course, if your team doesn’t already use Google products, it’s a difficult sell, especially at $25 per user per month. You’ll be rather hamstrung when it comes to all the features that make Copper CRM good in the first place. That, alongside overly complex workflow automations are two drawbacks worth taking into consideration, but on the whole Copper CRM is an impressive final contribution on our list of cloud contact management systems.
We hope this list of tools has helped shed some light on what’s out there on the market. But you’re still left with the question of “what’s the best contact management software for me?”
At Bitrix24, we can’t speak for everyone, but there’s a reason 12,000,000 users have already put their trust in us.
With Bitrix24, you get a range of contact management solutions for small businesses, from an all-encompassing CRM to all the communication channels you could dream of. As an all-in-one business tool, you don’t have to patch together an awkward union of integrations, which keeps your team (and your budget) organized and under control.
That’s quite a lot to take in, right? Well fear not — you can discover how all these tools work in harmony by signing up to Bitrix24 for free today!