We strongly believe that every business needs a CRM solution (CRM stands for customer relationship management) and especially for small businesses. Long past are the days of logging things purely with Excel or even worse, keeping them in a paper notebook or your head. Even small businesses now can have hundreds of details to keep track of about their customers. Customers, in turn, expect a lot more out of service than previously. And every good salesman knows – the most important thing is to remember every detail about your customer.

All differences between the CRMs for small businesses and those intended for enterprises are based on price. While CRMs for small businesses won’t have all the features, these generally aren’t even necessary at the early stages of growth. Furthermore, many of them are overcomplicated, thus demotivate the team from using them as often Enterprise CRMs are more focused on data collection and tracking for better large-scale business optimization instead of your sales team efficiency.

The decision-making process is made all the more difficult due to the immense proliferation of CRM solutions. CRMs have flooded the market – from those that are just glorified Excel to those who seem fit to manage the entire world. Picking the best CRM for small businesses is made increasingly harder due to the huge amount of choices.

Therefore, we decided to list the most important features for CRMs for small businesses in 2023. Here is also 5 Common CRM Software Mistakes you should read about as-well.  Additionally, in this article, you’ll find several criteria on how to evaluate CRMs and a suggestion for a specific CRM that could work for your Small Business.

Important features for CRM for small business 2023

As noted above, pricing will be the key determinant when picking a CRM for small businesses. Usually, they have heavily restricted budgets. As such, small businesses have to stay as lean as possible. Veering off this path can cause significant stagnation.

Small businesses should ensure that the CRM they are thinking about can cover several aspects. Each of these will be critical at all stages of development:

• Ability to maintain customer and contact database in one place
• Capture leads through website visits, filling forms, or requesting a demo
• Collect in-depth historical data about every lead and customer
• Ability to segment audiences and target them with emails or other marketing channels
• Foresee sales patterns
• Predict revenue through pipelines
• Automate part of the sales process

Every other feature offered by CRM solution providers isn’t that necessary. In fact, depending on the skillset of the account management and sales team additional features may only serve as a distraction. Large, sprawling CRMs work usually only when there are dedicated people working with the databases. In most cases, these people are unavailable for small businesses.

How to pick the best sales CRM for your sales team

Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as it used to be. The CRM solution market has been saturated. There are dozens upon dozens of different solutions, all seemingly the perfect CRM for small business. However, there are several things to keep in mind.

One is the availability of technical people. Integrating some CRMs into existing tech stacks might take some time. Additionally, if the CRM is highly technical and has to be maintained by technical or data workers, that will add invisible costs.

Secondly, it’s essential to evaluate the overall complexity of the CRM solution against the ability and size of your own teams. A great example is Salesforce. While the CRM solution hosts an immense amount of features and brings a lot of power, enterprises usually have dedicated Salesforce experts to manage the entire thing. CRMs as complex as Salesforce are usually not the best option for small businesses and not even for medium size companies. It mostly focuses on large enterprises that require custom solutions. You can easily see this from Salesforce reviews on Trustpilot.

In fact, price and the learning curve of CRM software might be the two foundational aspects. Small businesses should seek to keep both of these as low as possible. We at TeamGate focus on exactly that.

With these two criteria in mind, it shouldn’t be too hard to pick out the best CRM for small businesses. However, since the internet is flooded with different ones, picking one out can still take some time. That’s why we developed TeamGate.

What TeamGate can offer as a CRM for Small Businesses 2023

TeamGate is a CRM solution that is dedicated to small businesses. As such, our goal has been to have as little bloat with the best user experience possible. Additionally, we separated our solution into three different categories for even more customization.

• Starter – our simplest plan is dedicated to those looking for the very basics. Our starter plan will allow you to simplify contact management, email, and live communication, and use numerous integrations to make your life easier.
• Professional – an advanced plan for those who are looking to optimize. It includes everything from the Starter plan with some additional features. These features allow you to score leads, track the productivity of your teams, and the ability to set benchmarks.
• Enterprise – a plan for those looking to maximize. Every feature from previous plans is included. However, a whole host of new ones are available. These include in-depth and detailed reports with associated insights, advanced sales process management, and email delivery from a TeamGate account.

Our solution works with a wide variety of systems and can be integrated without hassle. Additionally, we support data imports from the most popular database file formats and even allow data transfers from other CRM solutions. Our support teams will help you achieve the latter to ensure that all data is transferred properly. You can also easily integrate it with either outlook or google mail and many other business solutions.

Finally, we know that investing right off the bat might not look wise to some. Thus, we are prepared to offer a free demo to ensure that our CRM for small businesses can fit the needs and requirements of our clients.

Conclusion

CRMs are a dime a dozen nowadays. There are solutions that hold every feature imaginable. However, they don’t always lead to great results. Feature bloat can often lead to confusion, a difficult learning curve, and price hikes – something all small businesses should avoid.

We believe TeamGate can deliver the same quality as some of the other well-known CRM solutions on the market without the difficult learning curve or associated feature bloat at an unbeatable price. Find out how our CRM solution for small businesses can benefit your business by booking a demo call with our team.