Are you managing contacts, business leads, tracking sales, project status all with Excel or Google Sheets? Do you like the process? If you answered Yes, well you can stop reading as you obviously love building macros and getting deep into excel.
If you answered no, to above. Well listen up, or read up! I’m going to share some great CRM tools that might get you out of the pickle and get you more organised. So you can track and capture leads using your website.
What is this CRM? Its a Customer Relationship Management system, basically a nice filing system for contacts.
Best Free CRM options.
Before we dive into the free options available, its important to know that the free options often come with restrictions and limits on certain features.. There are no real free options unless you go back to your excel spreadsheets.
Through a process of elimination, we have come up with the following two CRM tools which we think offer great value for freelancers, and small and growing business who requires entry-level CRM tools
Free Hubspot CRM
Hubspot is a clear leader in the CRM space, and they spend millions to make it a great system. It’s an easy tool use, the learning curve is easy and there is plenty of online training material available on how to use, and the extra training material to grow your business is a bonus.
Some of the free features you get inside with Hubspot for Free
- Email tracking & notifications
- Prospect tracking
- Meeting scheduling
- Contact management
- Live chat
- Reporting dashboard
- Company insights
- Deal tracking
- Pipeline management
- Email Marketing
What we like: It has a pretty intuitive feel, and the layout of Hubspot is pretty clean and doesn’t have that clunky feel. You can learn more about Hubspot by visiting their website hubspot.com
Agile CRM
Agile CRM was one of the first CRM tools I ever used and set up. What is good about their free offering is that you get the same options as paid plan up to 10 users for free, so if you are a small business or have a small team. It’s a perfect tool to use. It’s not the prettiest tool in the shed, however, the functionality that they offer and expanded features over Hubspot make it attractive to anyone who can see the beauty within.
Some of the free features you get inside with AGILE CRM for Free
- Email tracking & notifications
- Prospect tracking
- Meeting scheduling
- Contact management
- Live chat
- Reporting dashboard
- Company insights
- Deal tracking
- Pipeline management
- Email Marketing
- Social Media Management
- LinkedIn Lead Capture for Prospecting
- Dynamic Landing Page and Lead Magnet forms
What we like: We love the full suite of features you get access to inside, the flexibility in the setup to help shape and align to a business. The only thing that we don’t like is it looks a little dated on the User experience, but if you can see beyond, you will be fine. Learn more about AGILE CRM by visiting their website agilecrm.com
Best Paid CRM Options
Okay, I’m only going to mention one paid CRM tool of choice because its the only tool of choice I use to manage my website business. Its called Salesflare and I guess I got lucky as I scooped it up for lifetime membership access ($30) with an AppSumo deal some time ago.
Sales Flare CRM
Salesflare works a little differently to the others, it basically becomes an extension of your inbox and manages to keep all the emails for your clients nice and compact in one spot. The email campaign tools are great, the pipeline management tool is easy to manage and work with and IU like being able to see the subscription revenue in the sales forecasting. There is a lot of things it doesn’t do over the free options above, however, I really like the simplistic easy to use flow.
Some of the free features you get inside with SalesFlare CRM for Free
- Email tracking & notifications
- Prospect tracking
- Contact management
- Reporting dashboard
- Company insights
- Deal tracking
- Pipeline management
- Email Marketing
- Magic Setup – Sucks in all contact details
- API Integration with other tools
What we like: The simple clean approach to organising accounts and contacts. The setup process is very cool when you hook it up with your email, it somehow magically sucks in your contacts and organises everything. I find you tend to spend less time in the system and more on other business activities, that can only be a good thing!
You can learn more about Salesflare CRM by visiting their website Salesflare
Summary
All three CRM tools mentioned do work well with WordPress websites, so you can easily integrate the tool into your website so your website is working for you and your business. If you want a free one out of the box, give Hubspot a go, if you know you now you need a few more features then Agile might be a better choice.
Some final tips and advice to using a CRM system
- Make sure you integrate with your email program of choice
- Allow up to 6 weeks to get a feel for how it all works for you an your customers
- You will get frustrated, but give it time and patience (remember its free).
- Create a test email to which you can send emails and test elements before pushing to clients.
- Set up a funnel pipeline to track your opportunities
- (First Advance Task) Integrate and capture leads from your website to your CRM
- Have fun but don’t get bogged down in the system to much trying to make it do everything, treat the tool with respect and limit the functions to what you really need.
Please feel free to reach out and get in contact if you have questions about the CRM tools mentioned or need help in developing or getting your website to play and engage with your business.
