Top 11 Best CRMs For Sales Teams & Reps In 2024

Searching for the perfect CRM to help you achieve rocket ship sales growth? It’s no easy feat, there are now hundreds of CRM options specifically designed for sales teams on the market. Every business is different, every sales process has nuance and a CRM stack that works for business A may not work for business B through Z. The team at Shape tested 11 CRMs specifically designed for sales process management. In this article, we break down the pros, cons, features and pricing of 11 of the best CRM solutions designed for your reps and sales teams. Let’s get into it!

Why every sales team needs a CRM

If you work in or around the sales team, you’ll know the struggle.

You’re managing countless leads, prospects and clients daily. Between making sure you reply to the right email with the right information and getting back to every phone call, staying on top of your workload can be challenging.

That’s where a sales CRM comes in.

CRMs provide a huge number of benefits , they can revolutionize your relationships with key clients, leading to more sales and better customer retention. In fact, these systems can increase sales by up to 29%, and the average return on investment is $8.71 for every dollar spent. Impressive, right?

Some examples of how sales teams use CRMs are below:

1. Keep all lead, prospect and client information organized

CRMs act as a place to hold all your client-specific info, as well as contact details such as phone numbers and email addresses. Plus, other team members can see what stage of a process (deal) you’re at with a particular client, which reduces the chance of accidentally doubling up on tasks.

2. Automate the sales processes

Many of the CRMs currently on the market come with automation features. You can, for example, use some CRMs to set up personalized email sequences or log information that comes directly from your live chat software to give you more context on previous customer interactions. This automation frees up your time and energy, allowing you to focus on outreach and growth.

3. Segment customers to improve conversion rates

Different customers have different needs and are at different stages in the sales funnel. But without a CRM, it’s difficult to segment your clients into groups, i.e. which clients require a follow-up call or which customers have previously purchased an item from you. CRM software allows you to list clients, customers, or deals into categories broken down by criteria, making it easy to segment your customers by industry or by the status of their potential deals. Plus, segmenting allows you to do a lot more than simply have an overview of a deal’s pipeline. CRMs allow you to run customer-specific or account-based marketing and lead generation using segmented lists.

4. Boost sales

When it comes down to it, streamlining processes, segmenting customers, and saving time all mean one thing – increased profits. Investing in a sales CRM increases your chances of attracting and retaining key customers through improved customer experience, better targeting, and speedier responses. It’s a win for your customers and a win for your bottom line.

The key features to look for in sales CRM software

Choosing the right sales CRM for your business can be challenging, so start by establishing which features you need from your CRM system. Some systems are better for B2C businesses with a huge volume of sales, while others work better for B2B sales teams.

Some CRMs perform specific tasks better than others or offer different features. It’s worth making a list of the tasks you want to streamline and the features required to do so before choosing your sales CRM. Here’s what to look out for.

Sales pipeline management

Your CRM of choice should be able to automate or allow for the manual creation of a sales pipeline . Through this pipeline, you can manage the sales cycle from quantifying leads to storing updates for yourself and the rest of your team.

Customer insights

The best CRM tools go beyond just storing customer data; they use it to produce insights and analytics. From these insights, you can spot trends and use these trends to inform your future marketing strategy.

Automation

The more repetitive tasks can be automated, the more free time you’ll have to focus on growing your business and chasing leads. Look out for automation features such as email campaigns to reduce your manual workload.

Customer service tools

Cultivating long-term customer relationships requires a high level of customer service, which your CRM should help you provide. Look for tools such as email and SMS inboxing and live chat, or at least seek out a CRM that integrates with an external help desk system.

What’s the most popular CRM tool?

According to G2 and as voted by PC Mag for 2023, Salesforce Sales Cloud is the most popular CRM tool. This popularity comes mainly as a result of years in the business to cultivate a customer base, as well as extensive features and an easy-to-use interface.

Quick comparison of CRM software for sales teams and reps

The top 11 best CRM software for sales teams and reps are:

1. Shape CRM
2. Pipedrive
3. HubSpot CRM Suite
4. Close
5. Less Annoying CRM
6. Pipeline CRM
7. Salesflare
8. Freshsales
9. Zoho CRM
10. Salesmate
11. Salesforce Cloud

1. Shape

Shape CRM stands out as an all-in-one solution for managing contacts, streamlining business operations, and ultimately driving sales. It comes with industry-leading pipeline management, automation, and customer service features built to help you manage and optimize sales opportunities throughout the stages of your lead journey.

One feature that sets Shape apart from other CRM for sales is its fully integrated communications center. With the built-in call, email, and text functionalities, this feature provides all you need to enhance your customer service.

Shape also integrates smoothly with Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, and external help desk systems so you won’t have to juggle between your inbox and sales software while interacting with your customers. With everything in one system, you can manage your interactions easily, provide a high level of customer service and build long-term customer relationships.

Another way Shape helps you optimize sales opportunities is by automating simple tasks so you can focus on closing more leads. Sales teams carry out multiple simple and repetitive tasks daily such as sending follow-up emails, scheduling meetings, lead qualification, and more.

However, with Shape’s automation features like AI lead scoring, automated drip campaigns, and calendar sync, the CRM can carry out repetitive tasks for you in the background while you focus on nurturing high-quality leads and converting them to sales.

As you carry out your sales efforts, Shape stores all your customer data for compliance and record keeping. But it doesn’t stop there. The CRM platform also converts the data to useful insights and statistics through its comprehensive reporting and analytics.

Accessing these statistics on the CRM is easy. One glance at your dashboard and you can see all the important numbers from your sales efforts. However, just having these figures is not enough. Compiling them into a report helps you spot trends and influence your future marketing strategies.

Shape comes with over 50 pre-built reports to visualize virtually every detail of your business. On top of this, you can build custom reports and get any specific information you need to make business decisions.

Want to see the CRM in action? You can request a demo of the Shape CRM platform to see how it can speed up your sales efforts. All the key features are covered in a $119 monthly pricing plan.

Overall, Shape’s all-in-one functionality and industry-leading pipeline management features make it the top choice for sales CRM. Its fully integrated communications center also sets it apart from other CRMs on this list. However, with comprehensive features comes a learning curve, but the 4.7/5 score on Capterra for its ease of use and intuitive interface, shows that users quickly adapt to the system.

Many customers also attest to Shape’s effectiveness in driving sales. One customer happily stated, “Shape has increased our sales by over 26%. We would be lost without their system.”

2. Pipedrive

Pipedrive is a ubiquitous name in the world of Sales CRMs, and for good reason. It’s easy to use and can adapt to teams of all sizes. This platform has a simple drag-and-drop interface that can manage all tasks like adding and updating deals. Despite its simplicity, Pipedrive is very powerful – with the capability to manage over 3000 open deals simultaneously.

This sales CRM’s core offering is its visual sales pipeline, which creates a visual dashboard of the entire sales funnel. It allows you to see at which stage your prospects are and what action you need to take to move them toward closing. What’s more, it can be customized to support your sales process. This pipeline can also be accessed from any device.

Time is a critical resource for salespeople and Pipedrive saves a lot of it by automating routine tasks at every stage of the sales pipeline. Setting up workflows for sales automation in Pipedrive is very intuitive. Further, it has many pre-made automated workflows.

Pipedrive comes with an AI-powered sales mentor that provides practical, contextual recommendations like notifying you if any deals don’t have an activity scheduled sometime soon. This automated system can also extract useful information about your contacts using an email address.

While in-built marketing and communication features are not Pipedrive’s strong suit, it makes up for this limitation by offering a powerful contact management system. Pipedrive organizes your contacts into people and organizations, grouping leads and clients by association. It also provides a visual timeline of all emails, calls, and activities of each contact in your database.

A CRM platform for sales reps wouldn’t be complete without the means to call your prospects. To that end, Pipedrive allows you to integrate your contact data with telephony integrations like Google Meet, Twilio, and CloudTalk.

Pipedrive has several tools for lead management, sales forecasting, and goal management helping you maximize sales and profits. It also integrates with lead generation tools like Prospector.

With over 100,000 customers across 179 countries, it has proved its ability to support the needs of a wide range of teams. Pipedrive is a customer favorite, evidenced by high ratings on G2 and Capterra. A satisfied customer states that:

“Pipedrive has changed our businesses and propelled it into the digital world!”

With a starting price of $9.90, Pipedrive is one of the cheapest Sales CRM systems in 2024. It’s highly extensible, offering add-ons and integration that improve its features and functionalities.

3. HubSpot CRM Suite

The HubSpot sales hub, part of the Hubspot CRM platform, offers comprehensive tools to make the sales process efficient.

The sales hub has all the standard tools one would expect in a CRM and some advanced features like document tracking, sales management playbooks, and conversation intelligence. It can integrate with over 1200 apps through its marketplace.

This sales platform tracks your client’s interaction with your emails and documents to gather insights. It also automates several critical functions like prospecting, meeting scheduling, call management, and follow-ups.

HubSpot’s conversation AI automatically takes notes and provides insights into your team’s calls. As a result, it can unlock coaching opportunities, quantify competitive trends, surface top objections, and identify changes in market dynamics.

As an all-in-one software, it even allows you to build and manage your sales enablement content library. In addition, it has versioning and document-sharing features so that your team has ready access to the most updated information.

HubSpot is among the most noteworthy and feature-rich CRM platform for salespeople. However, it can be overwhelming for small businesses that need a minimalist feature set. Moreover, the costs can grow rapidly and become expensive for small teams and independent sales reps.

If you operate a larger team, HubSpot is perhaps the best option for you. It is highly rated and provides excellent customer support.

4. Close

Close is an acclaimed CRM system for modern businesses looking to turn leads into revenues. It works best for remote teams and sales teams with high-volume outreach. It offers similar tools to other popular CRMs, including sales pipelines, in-app calling, reporting, and analytics. However, it’s much easier to use and provides excellent customer support.

The most powerful tool of Close is the Dialer with power and predictive dialing capabilities. It automatically calls through a list saving the rep the time and effort of switching between apps to make calls. It displays all information and history about the call subject, allowing your team to have the full context of the conversation. The predictive Dialer further boosts outreach rates by dialing multiple numbers simultaneously and connecting to a Rep only when a human answers the phone. This call management feature is a game changer for sales teams with high-volume outreach.

Close enables you to automate email and calling by defining workflow sequences. A KPI-based report dashboard helps you optimize the workflow.

This CRM’s final offering is an extensive list of integrations with other business software, including Zapier, Shopify, and Zendesk. These integrations include integrations with Gmail, Outlook, and other email providers, allowing you to synchronize your inbox and receive messages in-app.

Most customers have reported switching from their existing CRMs in favor of Close. In an industry where users are fiercely loyal to their customer management solutions, Close offers something the competition doesn’t.

5. Less Annoying CRM

Unlike most CRMs that aim to be all-in-one solutions, Less Annoying CRM offers a minimal feature set with three core tools and several add-ons. It’s popular among startups and businesses with small teams.

Less Annoying CRM offers one of the best team collaboration workflows in 2024. You can create multiple users and assign unique roles and permissions to each of them. Moreover, you can set up sharing so that team members can see each other’s tasks, appointments, and activities. The in-built calendar eliminates the need for dedicated calendar software.

This CRM’s customer view provides a central dashboard for customer data management. It displays each customer’s tasks, files, notes, events, and pipeline data. In addition, the filtered search feature helps you find contacts quickly.

Similarly, Less Annoying CRM’s Workspace organizes all pending tasks, contracts, and activities in a single location, allowing you to manage them easily.

Because it’s web-based, you can access Less Annoying CRM from any device with an internet connection. It automatically manages backups, security, and software updates, allowing your team to focus on making sales rather than technical details.

Despite being a low-cost, no-frills CRM, it offers customization. You can configure yourself or get the help of their support team; no need for expensive consultants.

Remarkably, Less Annoying CRM has perfect ratings on G2 – the highest customer satisfaction ratings of any software on this list. Many customers praise its ease of use and single-tier pricing model.

This platform may not be the best solution for large teams that require full-featured software. It lacks automation or email campaigns, and the integrations are insufficient to provide the missing functionalities. However, it’s affordable for smaller teams looking for an advanced contact manager.

6. Pipeline CRM

Pipeline CRM is another affordable Sales CRM system for small and medium-sized businesses. It creates a list view of the sales pipeline. With its many filters, the list view enables effortless and intuitive deal management.

This CRM has a curated set of features that work out of the box to help sales teams work efficiently. It is easy to set up and offers good customization options that you can configure yourself. In addition, it provides technical assistance if custom features are required.

Further, this CRM for sales management enables remote teams to collaborate effectively. The central hub tracks all team activities and organizes shared data into a single location. Features like commenting and conversations, collaborative pipeline management, and deal sharing ensure team members are in sync.

Pipeline CRM generates powerful reports that give comparative insights into team and company performance. It offers unlimited reports and dashboards on all plans.

The CRM recently added automated pipelines to its feature set, putting it on par with other top sales CRM tools like Active Campaign and Pipedrive. These pipelines automatically assign tasks and update leads as they progress. It also notifies sales reps and other team members of every update, including reached milestones and closed deals. In addition, pipeline CRM has a Smart suggestion system to automatically show the next step for a Deal, enabling your team to make optimized decisions.

This platform’s email sync streamlines sales communication. It syncs with email to create a history of all client communication in the CRM. It also has email templates, mass email campaign management, and inbox management features.

The sales forecasting feature helps you understand past trends to confidently identify the best sales reps to hit and exceed quota. It also shows which team members you need to work with more closely.

It can also track foreign currency and perform automatic conversions using the latest exchange rates.

The sales CRM extends its features through integrations with standard business software, including Mailchimp, Zapier, and Excel. You can also integrate your email service provider and view your inbox from within the app.

Additionally, the SuperShare feature allows you to collaborate with trusted partners and businesses, granting access to your sales pipeline with varying levels of security.

Pipeline CRM lacks call functionalities and struggles with payments. Nevertheless, it’s a good CRM software that customers choose for its ease of use and intuitive UI. The reporting feature has also received particular praise for the ease of creation, modification, and execution of reports.

7. Salesflare

Salesflare is an intelligent CRM designed for small businesses offering B2B services. Its driving philosophy is that all the user has to do is compose emails and make calls, and it handles every other task. It has the most advanced automation tools of any CRM and performs virtually all business tasks without human intervention.

One of Salesflare’s strengths is real-time information tracking. It uses this feature to collect information on your leads and customers before they even interact with your website. So if you want to expand your reach and conduct mass email marketing campaigns, Salesflare is the CRM for you. All it requires is a name and company to find a lead’s email.

Most users claim that Salesflare’s automation features save up to four hours weekly for each team member. It shouldn’t be a surprise, given that Salesflare saves time on manual reporting by automating meeting and phone logs. It even automatically organizes content shared with a client by creating document folders for each. Salesflare is so efficient in this that many customers rely on its document management without reservations.

What’s more, it can work as a sidebar on your email or LinkedIn without any loss in functionality.

It is loved by customers who have rated it 4.8/5 stars on G2. Customer support has also received praise for their timely response to issues. Furthermore, many customers love Salesflare for its ease of use on mobile devices.

8. Freshsales

Freshsales is a highly-rated sales automation software offered as part of the Freshworks software suite. It helps find more leads using a combination of AI-powered chatbots, web forms, and website tracking.

This platform offers a 360-degree customer information view to help sales and customer service teams create personalized experiences for each customer. The customer view provides a timeline of all customer activity, such as interactions with your apps or website.

What’s more, the CRM facilitates customer engagement through four main communication channels: email, chat, phone and messenger. It can manage customized marketing campaigns, logs and metrics. It can also integrate with SMS and Zoom.

It can automate deal management, marketing campaigns, prospecting and lead assignment. Freshsales’s automation features extend to lead scoring, deal insights, and sales forecasting.

This platform leverages AI to provide in-depth analysis. As such, you can measure performance with graphical reports and use predictions to gain actionable insights.

Freshsales offers many unique features like offline sync and weighted pipeline. Moreover, it provides several integrations that help augment its functionalities. Consequently, Freshsales can easily handle complex operations and can be a bit overwhelming for smaller teams.

9. Zoho CRM

Zoho has established itself as a giant in the business SaaS industry, with over 80 million customers. It is a fully-featured sales CRM software, offering every functionality you can ever need for your managing your entire sales cycle.

This CRM’s top feature is Sales Force automation which saves time on lead, contact, account, and deal management.

It also includes a robust analytics engine that examines sales data and provides valuable business insights. The AI-powered assistant, Zia, finds patterns in your contact data and suggests optimized workflows to operate on them. You can also create macros from everyday tasks and execute them simultaneously when triggered.

It is a highly customizable CRM. It integrates with Canvas Design Studio to provide unrestricted customization of all in-app elements. As a result, you can design the portal to your tastes and include your company colors and logos. It also has a large collection of templates to serve as inspiration.

Another of Zoho CRM’s valuable tools is the Omnichannel for real-time communication with leads and customers. It allows you to import contacts and emails from your inbox into Zoho CRM, giving you full access to email reports, analytics, and marketing automation. It also connects with your social media and provides live chats, web forms, web conferencing, and self-service portals for maximum customer engagement.

Additionally, the Phonebridge integration connects you with any of Zoho CRM’s telephony partners, for robust call management. Interestingly, this platform’s pricing model has four plans with numerous features. You only need to upgrade to higher tiers as your business grows. All basic features required to run a business are included in the free plan.

10. Salesmate

Salesmate offers a robust feature set that includes some of the best sales CRM tools, specifically designed to address all aspects of sales and marketing. It promises to reduce the time engaging prospects by up to 50% using Smart emails, built-in calling, web forms, and text messaging.

Its intelligent email system offers pre-defined templates and smart BCC to help you personalize your emails and track their performance. In addition, Salesmate allows you to create automated email workflows and organize conversations with email threading.

Many Sales reps value Salesmate for its lead scoring, Smart segmentation, and automated follow-ups. These marketing features help to capture and convert more sales-qualified leads quickly.

With the in-built call tracking tool, sales reps can follow up on leads anywhere in the world. In addition, it provides toll-free local and international virtual numbers and can forward phone calls to your mobile phone.

Another valuable feature Salesmate offers is data entry automation. This feature all but eliminates manual activity tracking. Instead, it synchronizes with emails and calendars, allowing you to track all calls, meetings, notes, and deals. As such, you can spend more time making sales rather than performing repetitive tasks.

Salesmate integrates with G-Suite apps, including Google Contacts, Google Maps, and Google Calendar.

It offers several other standard CRM tools, including a sales pipeline, 360-degree customer view, team inbox, automated sequences, Activity insights, and many more.

Indeed, it’s an all-in-one sales CRM software. What’s more, Salesmate’s $12 starting price makes it one of the best sales CRM software.

11. Salesforce Cloud

Salesforce Cloud is the biggest competitor to Zoho CRM when considering the number of features and customer count. It caters to a prestigious list of customers, including government agencies and industry giants. Yet, it remains an excellent sales CRM solution for small businesses, evidenced by its small business pricing plan. This software provides several marketing, e-commerce, and customer relationship management tools under the Customer 360 software bundle.

The sales app helps salespeople boost their productivity using a visual workflow. This simple but powerful drag-and-drop tool allows you to design and automate sales activities. It is also available on the mobile version of the software, so you can receive updates and track your business on the go. Additionally, the sales app provides a complete view of each contact in your database, showing activity history and key information.

This CRM for sales team offers a highly sophisticated customer service management tool – a feature often overlooked by CRMs. This platform allows you to create automated workflows that help scale the customer service system. It also provides omnichannel routing so your teams can respond to calls, emails, texts, and chats. What’s more, Salesforce Cloud features a self-service portal with real-time chatbots that can provide automated responses.

In addition, this CRM offers several other tools in a flexible and easy-to-use user interface. For example, it allows you to create custom dashboards that display customizable reports. You can also leverage the Tableau integration to automate analysis and obtain actionable insights on your sales data.

With 20 years of experience providing CRM tools to business owners, Salesforce knows how best to make sales and keep your customers happy. Despite polarizing reviews concerning its customer support, Salesforce remains one of the best sales CRM systems in 2024.

The bottom line

CRM software can transform your business’s efficiency and supercharge your sales, so it’s well worth the investment if you’re looking to grow. With the help of our list, you can find the perfect CRM to help you reach your objectives.

But no two systems are the same, and every CRM has something unique to offer, whether that’s value for money or a set of features you won’t find elsewhere. Before choosing the right CRM for your sales team, establish your needs and your non-negotiables, and use a software comparison checklist to find your fit

Need more business advice? Take your pick from one of our many well-researched articles

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• Best CRM for Pipeline Management
• Best Lead Management CRM Software

Please note: All pricing mentioned in this article is based on information available as of 04-1-2024 and sourced from the respective companies’ public pricing pages. While we strive for accuracy, we recommend verifying with the specific company for the most up-to-date details.