Seven - what a lovely little number.

Did you know, the two opposite sides on a dice add up to seven?

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The Magnificent Seven. The Seven Wonders of the World. Three sevens and that’s blackjack my friend.

CRM - what a lovely little idea. Bring them both together, and what do you get..?

The 7 best CRM systems for your business to choose from in 2021.

1. The best CRM for everything: NetHunt CRM

The mission is to get everything your business needs under one tab. We’re proud that NetHunt is widely regarded as the best Gmail CRM, integrating directly with your inbox to bring powerful CRM functionality to your favourite email platform. With NetHunt, you can do everything you need.

NetHunt CRM features a flexible contact database, based around records made up of deals and contacts. Records are fully customisable and filled with fields upon fields of information for a business to harness and manipulate as part of a fully automated sales process.

Sales automation is the streamlining of tedious, time-consuming tasks in a company’s sales process. You know the ones: the admin, the checking of accounts to see what’s happening, and all that god-damn data entry. Sales automation saves you time; most importantly it makes you money.

Capture incoming leads with handsome lead generation web forms built in an intuitive builder. Drag your net wide for outbound leads with integrations with social media platforms, such as LinkedIn. Nurture leads with automatic drip campaigns and bulk emails. Set reminders for sales teams to follow up. Never miss a beat again. No leads fall through the cracks, no prospect gets neglected.

No complicated integrations, and no coding experience required whatsoever. Sales automation is a flexible tool that can be bent to fit just about any sales workflow. It greases up your pipeline so leads can move through it without resistance.

NetHunt CRM at a glance

NetHunt CRM pricing

14 day free trial available.

Prices start at $24 per user, per month.

2. The best free CRM: HubSpot CRM

HubSpot CRM is forever free for unlimited users and up to one million contacts. The HubSpot CRM is built for smaller teams, but as that team grows they may want to pay for access to HubSpot's other features that offer further opportunities for growth. Ultimately, it makes managing relationships easy.

HubSpot CRM isn’t a fully-fledged Gmail CRM, but it does offer a Chrome extension. Included in the free package are deal and client tracking, landing page builders, chatbot builders, basic email marketing tools, third-party and Zapier integrations, and a ticketing system for customer support.

Surely HubSpot can’t be free forever, they’ve got a business to run! Our guess is that the free version of HubSpot CRM is designed to offer a taste of their meatier Sales, Marketing, and Service Hubs. Once a team has grown beyond HubSpot’s functionality, they’re more likely to buy the add-ons.

HubSpot are especially famous in the CRM industry for their extensive online knowledge base which straddles a range of sales, marketing, support, CRM, and business issues to the benefit of a huge audience. The CRM system itself is simple, but the HubSpot empire is complex.

Hubspot CRM at a glance

Hubspot CRM pricing

Free for unlimited users and unlimited time.

From $50/month if you add on the Marketing, Sales, or Service Hub.

3. The best big name CRM: Salesforce CRM

Alas, it’s hard to work in the CRM industry and not be in awe of Salesforce CRM. Widely regarded as the world’s leading CRM system, the fact that the tallest skyscraper in downtown San Francisco is called the Salesforce Tower tells you everything you need to know about this company.

Salesforce CRM’s success is reflected in the dozens of awards it won from respected industry outlets such as CRM Magazine, ZDNet, and Destination CRM. This success is also reflected in the fact that Salesforce provides services for 99 out of 100 companies on the Fortune 100 list. Please forgive me, but my SEO keyword dashboard is telling me I need to say Salesforce CRM just one more time.

T-Mobile, Western Union, and Adidas are just some of the superstar names on Salesforce’s books. This is a big CRM business for big business. But I just can’t help but ask one very simple question… What makes Salesforce CRM so good?

Salesforce’s Sales Cloud works well for businesses of most sizes, despite all the glamorous names. This is thanks to a special tiered delivery system. Salesforce CRM offers enterprise features such as opportunity tracking, lead scoring, pipeline management, email marketing, and an email template library; customisable dashboards, and huge integration capabilities. Functionality everywhere.

Salesforce CRM at a glance

Salesforce CRM pricing

Free trial available.

Prices start at $25 per user, per month.

4. The best conversational relationship platform: Intercom

Intercom’s marketing position is that they’re a conversational relationship platform. It’s a platform that enables users to build relationships as the customer journey unfolds. This is done by providing conversational, messenger-based, engaging experience for individual prospects and clients, eventually developing a happy and loyal customer base. Well… that’s the idea anyway.

Intercom’s flagship feature is its business messenger. This is a powerful but flexible tool which allows users to build and embed support live-chat boxes on their website. Their website boasts that users can handle 1.6x more tickets with Intercom Messenger, and we can see why.

Intercom is a flexible system with huge opportunities to automate processes. Customer profiles are central and accessible, there’s a great knowledge base like HubSpot, a ticket and case management system, and a response-automation builder. Like I said, Intercom is all about communication.

🌟 Did you know… The best CRM for everything, NetHunt CRM, features a native Intercom integration. That means you’ve got all your client interactions, from emails, meeting notes, and live chats within your CRM dashboard. Nothing gets missed; nobody slips through the cracks.

Intercom at a glance

Intercom pricing

Free trial available.

Prices start at $? per user, per month.

5. The best email marketing CRM: MailChimp

MailChimp is an email marketing platform. It deals with all a business’s email correspondence with prospects, leads, and clients in an easy but beautiful way. MailChimp is a web-based platform, and you deal with all your marketing automation needs straight out of their beautiful website.

Despite what you may have heard, email marketing isn’t dead. It’s an easy, customer-centric, and cheap method of engaging with a prospect and customer base. MailChimp, with huge opportunities for customisation, automation, and personalisation, is an email marketing game-changer.

Principally, email marketing helps you put out better content. Design sexy email campaigns and personalise them with individual client details at the click of a button. Segment the contacts that you want to receive your email marketing campaigns; make sure they hit your target audience every time. Automate drip campaigns and check out the reports dashboard afterwards.

MailChimp does the complicated things simply. Originally built for small business email marketing, that chimp in a hat has grown to serve big, sometimes well-known organisations such as New Belgium Brewing, TED Talks, and video sharing platform Vimeo.

MailChimp at a glance

MailChimp pricing

Free version available.

Prices start at $9.99 per user, per month.

6. The best open source CRM: Odoo

Odoo was founded in 2005 with the unique selling point of being an open source CRM. Open source CRM means the code within the application can be distributed, modified, and redistributed by users in any way they see fit. It is the ultimate customisable CRM platform, bending to fit your business.

The idea of open source CRM is that users look at the underlying code that makes up Odoo and develop bug fixes, application improvements, or even new features. To take advantage of this, companies could hire developers to develop a platform that meets their exact needs.

Odoo’s extendable architecture offers a modular dashboard design. That means you can build the system based on your favourite features and have them available to you at any time. Such unparalleled personalisation also means there is a huge library of potential integrations for Odoo.

Brick-and-mortar enterprises are high up on Odoo’s portion of active customers. This is thanks to the point-of-sale app that manages the whole sales operation from, from inventory management and email marketing, to sales and pricing. Whatever you need, Odoo offers the opportunity.

Odoo at a glance

Odoo pricing

Free trial available.

Prices start at $24 per user, per app, per month.

7. The best CRM for project management: Zoho CRM

It feels like Zoho CRM has been around for ages… because it has. Ever since 1996, they’ve been developing a CRM to make your sales and marketing life easier. If you’re a small business starting out, Zoho CRM appeals as a free Gmail CRM. The free version is capped at three users.

Sure Zoho have got the basics on lock - organise your contact database, hit them with targeted campaigns, work you way up to a sales push and then deal with the post-sale process when they’ve converted. But, what we like the most about Zoho’s business potential is how good it is as a project planning tool for small business. Zoho CRM centralises project planning.

Zoho’s project planning potential is enabled through file sharing, better collaboration through feeds, chats, notes, and 1GB of shared storage. All information is updated in real-time, so no team member is left behind. The system also features shared calendar booking and synchronisation.

Zoho CRM at a glance

Zoho CRM pricing

Free version available, capped at three users.

Prices start at $12 per user, per month.

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