9 Powerful CRMs and Use Cases for a Growing Business

There are many customer relationship management (CRM) tools today, and each one has many features, integrations, and capabilities. So, how do you decide which CRM is best for your team? Also, every CRM can do a wide range of things.

What do some of these jobs look like? How can you ensure you get the most out of your CRM? This blog post will talk about seven of the best CRMs on the market to help you narrow down your search. We will also give examples of how each tool could be used.

Hubspot

HubSpot is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform. This means that it keeps track of customer relationships and helps with marketing, sales, and customer service. HubSpot is great for any growing business, big or small, and any team (marketing, sales, customer service, operations, or C-suite).

The platform combines Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, and CMS with hundreds of available integrations to help you align all of your internal teams, gather meaningful insights, report on (and share) success and growth opportunities, create amazing customer experiences, increase adoption, and delight your target audience at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

HubSpot is a single source for managing your customer relationships. Its user experience (UX) is so easy that you can spend more time with your customers and less time managing software and doing manual tasks. 

And speaking of your customers, they are a big part of what makes HubSpot different from other CRMs on the market. Everything you do in HubSpot is focused on your customers and their experience. So, you can grow better and help your customers grow better at the same time.

Align Your Data is an example of how HubSpot is used.

HubSpot adds all of the interactions with contact to that person’s timeline. This gives everyone on your team, from sales to marketing to customer service to operations, a single source of truth.

This also makes it easy for your team to look up and use that contact information when they need to. As a result, you will have the data alignment to keep customers happy and loyal.

Not only that, but HubSpot will enter, sync, and update your contact information for you, so you will not have to do it yourself.

Dynamics

Microsoft Dynamics is customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software that helps sales and marketing departments be more productive. The CRM collects social data, lets you manage campaigns in the cloud, and gives you business intelligence.

You can choose to deliver your CRM in the cloud, on-premises, or both. Microsoft Dynamics has apps that let you manage your relationships with customers on the go. You can also integrate and sync data from social media with your CRM using these apps.

Get In-Depth Customer Insights: This is how Dynamics is used.

A CRM can give you a full picture of your customers, and Microsoft Dynamics is no different. The CRM’s real-time customer data platform gives you insights powered by artificial intelligence (AI) about getting valuable leads and customers, who your audience is, what they need, how you can make them happy, etc.

Real-time insights about your customers are also based on their behavior, demographics, transactions, engagement, and customer feedback (e.g. survey data). This lets your team use these insights to make sales, marketing campaigns, support, and other things more targeted and personal.

Salesflare

Salesflare is a B2B sales CRM platform, which means it is made to keep track of and organize your business-to-business operations. Salesflare was made from the ground up to keep track of everything automatically. Their CRM automatically creates contacts and adds more information, like email signatures and full customer timelines. It also reminds you to follow up.

The Salesflare CRM has a built-in email sequence tool that lets you send personalized emails to many people. This can make your outreach much more effective. And if you use LinkedIn a lot, you will like their LinkedIn sidebar, which lets you add contacts from LinkedIn and find people’s email addresses with just a few clicks.

Use of Salesflare: Keep an eye on your sales

If you work in business-to-business sales, it can be hard to keep track of your leads organized. Sometimes, leads get lost, details get forgotten, or you follow up a little too late and lose the momentum.

A B2B sales CRM platform like Salesflare is made for just that. It makes it easy to keep track of your leads, so you do not miss any important information or lose money. Salesflare is also a great tool for sales managers who want to watch how their team is doing and coach them accordingly.

Salesforce

Customer360, Salesforce’s CRM, puts customer data, sales, service, marketing, commerce, IT, and analytics all in one place, making it easy to find, share insights, and work together. The CRM can manage leads and contacts, sales opportunities, workflow rules, automation, and reports and dashboards that can be changed to fit your needs. You can also use a mobile app to get to it.

Salesforce has many apps, like Einstein AI, that make it easier to reach your own goals. There are also features in the Employee Experience tool that makes it easier to work together and increase motivation.

One way to use Salesforce is to automate tasks that you often do.

Salesforce automates repetitive and time-consuming tasks, just like many other CRMs. AI is used in the Einstein AI feature to give your team information about how customers have interacted with them in the past. 

This lets you interact with your customers more thoughtfully and improve your relationships. It also makes your team more productive by giving them the information they need, like intelligent case classification and the next steps to take.

Einstein AI also makes it easier for reps to give great customer service and support by suggesting certain actions, customizing support for customers, and automating support with bots when possible to save reps time.

Zoho 

Zoho is a CRM that is fully integrated and based in the cloud. It has several features, such as lead management and scoring, workflow automation, analytics, and marketing and process management. Zia, Zoho’s AI sales assistant, looks at CRM data, keeps track of website visitors, and makes sales predictions. These sales predictions also show which leads, and deals are the most likely to turn into sales.

The gamification feature in Zoho keeps your sales reps motivated and on track with their goals, and the Google Ads integration brings your sales and marketing teams together by showing how much your business spends on ads and how much it makes from sales. Lastly, use Zoho to help customers and leads through all channels, including phone, email, live chat, social media, and in person.

Omnichannel Customer Experience is one way to use Zoho.

Zoho lets you give your contacts an omnichannel customer experience, which means you can help them via email, live chat, social media, or a face-to-face meeting, all without leaving the CRM. Any information learned through these interactions will be saved automatically in the CRM.

Put all of your emails in the CRM, and then you can send messages right from the tool. Every time you send or receive an email, your conversation history will be updated and saved. The same goes for your phone calls. You can make and receive sales and support calls from Zoho, so all of your conversations are recorded, and you never have to leave the tool. You can also use the CRM to host meetings and give presentations.

BIGContacts

With its simple design and easy-to-understand interface, BIGContacts makes it easier to manage relationships with customers. The CRM tool is a reliable way for businesses to keep track of all the information and interactions they have with their customers. It gives a full picture of all the information about a contact, including past interactions, social media profiles, notes, files, and upcoming events. The tool makes it easier for teams to work together, gives actionable business insights, and helps organizations be more productive.

BIGContacts lets you manage your sales pipeline, connect web forms, nurture leads, and keep track of tasks. There are also custom reports and dashboards that give you more information about how your business is running. BIGContacts can also be a powerful tool for managing tasks, thanks to its detailed calendar views, automated recurring tasks, and custom reminders.

BIGContacts is used in personalized drip campaigns.

Personal interactions are a huge part of building better relationships with customers. They make customers feel like they are important, making them more loyal to the brand and keeping them coming back. BIGContacts helps businesses use the information they have about their customers to make experiences that are more meaningful and interesting.

BIGContacts can be used to set up automated drip email campaigns that change based on what the contact does. You can get in touch with prospects and customers at the right time through these emails. Also, there are email templates you can use, which can save you a lot of time. You can also make your templates and save them to use again.

Pipedrive

Pipedrive is a CRM and pipeline management tool for sales that works well for small teams. The software is full of tools for tracking performance, managing deals, predicting revenue, and automating tasks that are done repeatedly. Pipedrive automatically draws a picture of your pipeline, so you can see where you should put your efforts.

Pipedrive has sales forecasting and integrations to use your existing tools, like Mailchimp or Zapier, with your CRM. A security feature also clarifies how your business data is being used.

Track Your Data and Security Is One Way to Use Pipedrive

Use Pipedrive to keep an eye on your data and security. The software keeps track of how and who accesses your company’s data. You can find suspicious users and activities in real-time through a single security dashboard. Set up alerts that tell you when and where users are logging in. Lastly, to keep your CRM data safe, make your own rules for safe practices (like time-limited access).

Freshworks

Freshworks is a sales CRM and customer engagement platform that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help your sales and marketing teams give each customer a personalized experience. There are two parts to Freshworks: the Sales Cloud and the Marketing Cloud.

The Sales Cloud helps get leads, make sure they are good leads, and close deals. AI is also used to predict sales and tell sales reps what to do with prospects.

A chatbot powered by AI lets you have automated conversations with customers through Marketing Cloud. It also gives you information about how your audience acts and how engaged they are, so you can figure out where to put your efforts and how to make campaigns and experiences that are highly targeted.

Example of Freshworks in Use: Align Sales and Marketing

Sales and marketing must work together for a business to be successful. A CRM like Freshworks can help your sales and marketing teams work together to boost productivity, make it easier for everyone to work together, and improve the customer experience.

With the Customer-for-Life Cloud feature, Freshworks organizes and updates contact and engagement data in a single place. This lets sales reps and marketers know exactly who they should be reaching out to.

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is a CRM and automation platform for the customer experience. You can automate several tasks and job functions, such as email, segmentation, and personalization (across social media, email, live chat, SMS, and more). To make the CRM fit your needs, you can use more than 300 integrations, like Shopify, Facebook, and WordPress.

ActiveCampaign makes it easy for teams to share information about customers and decide how to interact with them (e.g., what content you should send to them, when to reach out, and what channel to reach out over). ActiveCampaign also helps you get to know each customer better and divide them into groups by keeping track of buyer preferences, engagement, behavior, and unique characteristics.

With this and other features, like making your campaigns and messages, you can make your communication with prospects and customers more personal.

Example of ActiveCampaign in Use: Personalize Customer Experiences 

A CRM organizes a lot of information about each customer, and a CRM like ActiveCampaign makes it easy to use this information to give each customer a personalized experience.

ActiveCampaign automates personalization across channels like text, email, live chat, and social media by using machine learning. As your business grows, you can continue to automate these one-on-one interactions to ensure that every customer feels like a person and not just a number to your company.

ActiveCampaign also has Personalization Tags and Deal Fields that you can change. These features let you add personalized, dynamic content to campaigns, emails, SMS, web forms, deal follow-up messages, and more to make your communication specific to each person.

Pick Your CRM

A CRM can be used in many ways, and the seven examples above are just a few of them. Start thinking about your team’s goals and needs so you can choose the right CRM. Then, use your CRM to build stronger relationships with your contacts, improve the customer experience, save your team time, align business data, and grow better.

If you want to learn more about CRMs, here’s an article about what is a CRM certification.