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Businesses are built upon their relationships with customers. However, maintaining good long-term relationships with your customers can never be a walk in the park. The large amount of data involved, accompanied by the difficulty of keeping up with your customers and other intense tasks, makes the process even more challenging. This is when CRM comes in.
This article will give you a clear idea of why you need a CRM, what it does, and the necessity of using CRM for small businesses. We will also suggest how to choose the best CRM for your business backed up by our top 5 recommendations of CRM for small businesses in 2025.
Let’s begin!
Why a CRM?
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a software that deals with managing the interactions between the business and its customers—both actual and prospective.
Let’s say we own a small boutique and we get many customers every day. In this case, it will be hard to keep track of each customer’s details, such as who they are, what purchase they made, when they last visited, what they prefer, and the list goes on.
Even if we keep a close eye on these data manually, there could be chances where we miss out on a few details or forget them. The greater the customer base, the more the data and complexity.
CRM eases out this complex task by maintaining the details for you. It can store customer information, track interactions, and remember the important data in your stead. Some CRM even facilitates the automation of routine tasks.
What does a CRM do?
To make the greatest use of CRM, it is essential to know how it works. CRM is beyond just Customer Relationship Management. It can perform multiple functions to streamline your business activities efficiently. Here’s what a CRM is capable of doing:
Contact Management
With CRM you can store the contact information of every individual customer such as name, phone number, address, mail ID, etc., all in the same place. You don’t have to search through different databases to look for customer contact information when you can use CRM to organize them collectively. It can also record the history of every customer interaction with the business, which can be accessed to provide more personalized services in the future.
Lead Management
Leads are potential customers for the business. CRM for small businesses makes the process of generating, capturing, and managing leads easier. It tracks down your visitors and sorts out their data in order to choose suitable marketing strategies to approach and nurture them.
Pipeline Management
Best CRMs support efficient sales pipeline management by maintaining records of the leads’ journey through the various stages of the sales pipeline. This helps businesses to align their focus towards the stages that have a high potential to generate more revenue.
Automation
Tasks such as data entry, follow-up emails, lead nurturing campaigns, and raising invoices are repetitive and tiresome to work on individually. You can accomplish such mundane activities with ease by automating them through CRM.
Integration
Another reason why businesses go for CRM is because of the integration feature that allows for integration with third-party tools. From email, social media, and live chat applications to e-commerce, prospecting, and marketing software, a wide range of tools and software can be integrated into your CRM with the help of add-ons and extensions available on the internet.
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Need of CRM for Small Businesses
If you are wondering whether you need complex software like CRM for a small business, here are the reasons that prove CRM can boost your business performance greatly.
Timely Attention to Customers
Be it a loyal customer or a user who abandoned his cart long ago, timely attention and action can encourage the customer to proceed with the business. Using CRM you can schedule reminders, emails, phone calls, and other marketing campaigns and reach your customer at the right time. Since customer data is stored appropriately in the database, it can be accessed quickly ensuring timely resolution of any customer issues.
Time-Saving
Imagine the time and effort you can save when you automate most of your boring repeated tasks. Not to mention, being a small business owner, you will be responsible for taking care of multiple tasks. CRM is one of the best time-saving tools for businesses. It can help you manage time efficiently, leaving room to invest your precious time in making decisions for future business projects.
More Personalised Service
Who doesn’t love a personally tailored fit? Customization and an empathetic approach are all that a person seeks from customer service. CRM that maintains all interactions and details of the customer journey with the business, allows you to use the data to offer a more personalized service to customers based on their needs and wants.
More Revenue
When we say you can generate more revenue by incorporating CRM into your small business, we are referring to the cross-selling and upselling you can do by recommending customers with similar products to their previous purchases. An excellent understanding of your customers will enable you to close deals of higher value.
No Potential Customer is Missed Out
CRM is very useful when it comes to targeted marketing. You can identify potential customers with similar tastes and engage them with the right activities at the right time. Through CRM you can carefully monitor all of your leads and potential customers organized thoroughly in a centralized database so that no prospects are missed out.
Choosing The Best CRM for Small Businesses
There are several complex CRM software available in the market whose high-end features may not be necessary for a small business. You might even end up spending more on features you may never need. To start with, check for a simple CRM tool with the basic features you require the most, according to the size of your business.
Expensive tools need not necessarily be the best. Sometimes, you can find the most suitable software for your business at affordable prices. Go for a CRM that is easy to use and compatible for integration with the thirty-party software you currently use. Make sure to try out the free trial versions available, before purchasing.
Top 5 CRM Recommendations for Small Businesses in 2025
Here is the updated list of our top 5 recommendations of CRM for small businesses that you need to check out this 2025.
- Bigin by Zoho CRM
- Hubspot CRM
- Freshsales
- Pipedrive
- Agile CRM
- Bigin by Zoho CRM
Bigin by Zoho CRM is a lightweight CRM specifically created for small and micro businesses and is best known for its simple design and ease of use. It’s also known for its budget-friendly pricing for small businesses and startups.
Free Plan:
- Single pipeline management.
- Contact management, email integration, and built-in telephony.
- Custom fields for basic tailoring of workflows.
Priced Plan (starts at ₹400/user/month):
- Multiple pipelines for different business processes.
- Workflow automation (trigger-based actions).
- Advanced reporting with customizable dashboards.
- Integration with Zoho apps like Zoho Books and Zoho Desk.
For up-to-date pricing, visit Bigin’s pricing page
- Hubspot CRM
Hubspot CRM is highly recommended for businesses focusing on marketing, sales, and customer service. The plus of Hubspot CRM is that it contains multiple marketing tools even in its forever-free plan.
Free Plan:
- Unlimited users
- Up to 1 million contacts.
- Email tracking, meeting scheduling, and live chat.
- Basic reporting dashboards.
Priced Plan (Starts at $15/month):
- Marketing automation (email workflows, lead nurturing).
- Advanced reporting and predictive lead scoring.
- Sales tools like smart send times, quote templates, and deal automation.
- Integration with custom APIs and premium tools in the HubSpot ecosystem.
For up-to-date pricing, visit Hubspot’s pricing page
- Freshsales
Freshsales CRM is an AI-powered sales CRM. Small businesses that aim at driving sales growth through AI-driven insights and automation, can go for this CRM.
Free Plan:
- 1000 records
- Lead and deal management with a basic visual pipeline.
- Contact management with email integration.
- AI-based contact scoring for prioritization.
Priced Plan (Starts at ₹749/user/month):
- Unlimited records
- Freddy AI insights for predictions and recommendations.
- Behavioral tracking for email and website interactions.
- Workflow automation for lead assignment and follow-ups.
- Integrated telephony with call masking and recording.
For up-to-date pricing, visit Freshsales’ pricing page
- Pipedrive
Pipedrive is an excellent option for small businesses because of its affordability, user-friendly design, and focus on sales pipeline management. Pipedrive doesn’t offer a free plan but its paid plan is quite affordable with all the essential features required for a growing business.
Free Trial (14 days):
- Pipeline management with activity reminders.
- Basic integrations like email sync and Google Calendar.
Priced Plan (Starts at $14/user/month):
- Custom pipelines for different sales processes.
- Advanced automation (deal assignment, task reminders).
- Revenue forecasting and reporting dashboards.
- Sales chatbot for website lead generation.
For up-to-date pricing, visit PipeDrive’s pricing page
- Agile CRM
Agile CRM is an all-in-one solution for small businesses, as it can handle all areas of a business from sales and marketing to customer service and accounting.
Free Plan:
- 50,000 Contacts & 50 Emails per Day
- Basic Email Sync & Google Integrations
- Contact Segmentation & Tagging
- Pipeline Management with Activity Reminders
- Basic Social Media Integrations
Priced Plan (Starts at $8.99/user/month):
- Unlimited Contacts & Emails
- Advanced Email Marketing (Campaigns, Autoresponders, Tracking)
- Sales Automation
- Customizable Dashboards & Reporting
- Advanced Social Media Integration
For up-to-date pricing, visit Agile CRM’s pricing page
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Conclusion
The popularity of CRM tools has grown significantly in recent years and many businesses are being benefited greatly by incorporating CRM into their business activities. That is why we think you’ll miss out on a big fortune for your small business to thrive if you delay embracing it. We recommend checking out the above-listed top 5 CRMs to choose the one that best fits your business needs. Start your business success journey by choosing the right CRM today.
