Without a client management system, also called a CRM, most businesses struggle to provide a great experience for their customers. All because their customer data is scattered all over the place, and it’s difficult to keep track of customer interactions and conversations.
As a customer, let me confess that I’m loyal to my favorite brands because of the wonderful experiences they provide, and this is also true for many others. So, if you want to retain more customers and grow your business faster, you need a client management system asap.
According to Precedence Research, the global CRM market size was estimated at $69.94 billion in 2023 and is expected to reach around $248.13 billion by 2033.
In this guide, I’m sharing the 11 best client management software for businesses of all sizes. But first, let’s start from the beginning.
Table of Contents
- What is client management?
- What is a client management system?
- Why are client management tools important?
- What makes a great client management software tool?
- Best Client Management Software
- Client Management Is Better With a CRM
Client management involves delighting clients long-term, increasing retention, and earning word-of-mouth referrals. But what exactly is a client management system?
Why are client management tools important?
Client management tools are important because they provide benefits that help businesses organize, streamline, and improve their sales, marketing, and customer service functions for increased conversions, revenue, and profit.
Here are some of those benefits:
1. You’ll have a centralized customer database.
Instead of having customer information and data scattered in different files, a CRM stores everything in one location. This makes it easier and faster for anyone who works with such information to quickly access it, without wasting time or running around in circles.
2. You can learn more about your customers.
A CRM allows you to store detailed information about customers in one location. For each contact, this includes full name, email address, phone number, social media accounts, birthday, website, purchase history, previous email or live chat communications, and so on.
This will not only provide a holistic view of each contact but also increase your knowledge and understanding of them, make it easier to personalize every interaction and communication, meet their needs, and ultimately provide a wonderful customer experience.
3. You’ll increase customer satisfaction and retention.
With a CRM, you can respond promptly to inquiries, address and resolve customer complaints quickly, and generally provide excellent customer service.
Because of the data you have on each customer, you can gain insights into their purchase history and buying behavior, anticipate their needs, and come up with a personalized offer that’s too good for them to resist.
A CRM can also remind you to fulfill any promise made to customers, follow up with a recent customer, or even reach out to an old customer.
All these can go a long way to delight your customers, boost their engagement with your products and services, convince them to become repeat customers, and increase customer retention.
4. You can automate everyday tasks and increase efficiency.
A CRM will allow you to simplify and automate everyday tasks that are repetitive and time-consuming.
For example, you can automate all sorts of data entry, like logging calls, emails, meetings, and so on. You can even automate qualifying and managing leads, segmenting your contact list based on various factors, deal tracking, follow-up reminders, sales forecasting, and much more.
This way, you and your team can save time and energy that would have been spent on those tasks and dedicate them to more important business areas.
5. You’ll boost internal and external communication.
You can communicate with prospects and customers through your CRM, respond promptly to inquiries, save a record of such conversations, and be able to track them when necessary.
You can also use a CRM to update colleagues or ensure every team member is on the same page concerning an issue. This way, you can avoid unnecessary back-and-forth communication delays and boost team collaboration and productivity.
6. You can protect customer data and information.
A CRM can keep your customer data safe and secure since everything is stored in one location. In addition, it can also make it easier for you to comply with relevant laws on customer data and privacy.
For example, if you have customers in the European Union (EU), you are legally required to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Doing this manually is not smart since it can be tasking and error-prone. However, with a GDPR-compliant CRM, you can easily comply with the law without creating any room for mistakes.
7. You can make better decisions with data-based insights.
In case you didn’t know, a CRM has data analytics, visualization, and reporting abilities. Because it’s a centralized location for all your customer data, it can sort and analyze all this data and present it to you in the form of reports, summaries, charts, graphs, and other visuals whenever needed.
As a result, you can quickly make sense of it, spot trends, track performance, extract actionable insights, and make accurate predictions. All these will help you make better decisions about your sales, marketing, customer support, and the business in general.
8. You’ll increase conversions, sales, and profits.
In essence, a client management tool is very important because it gives you easier and faster access to all your customer data, helps you understand customers and deliver outstanding customer experiences, shortens the sales cycle, and increases conversions and sales.
In addition, a CRM provides valuable business insights, improves communication within teams and across departments, increases efficiency and productivity, reduces wastages, saves time and money, and also increases revenue and profit.
What makes a great client management software tool?
A great client management software tool is more than just a place to store customer data. It’s a robust system that just about anyone in your organization can use to further client relationships. Taking all these into consideration, I’ve identified 10 important features of a great CRM below.
1. Ease of Use
Make sure the CRM you choose is easy to adopt and use for everyone on your team, whether they’re new CRM users or not. This will encourage widespread usage of the CRM, allow you to onboard new hires faster, and you and your team won’t have to spend a lot of time learning the software.
2. Contact Management
You need a CRM with solid contact management features to collect, organize, and store detailed information about your prospects and customers in one place. This feature should also make it easy to create a new contact, add new contact information, share contact info with your team, and quickly access, track, and segment customer information when necessary.
3. Data Analytics and Reporting
I recommend you choose a CRM that can analyze all your customer data, spot trends and patterns, and generate reports on metrics that matter to your business. This will help you keep tabs on customer behavior, gain insights into the performance of your sales, marketing, and customer service teams, and quickly discover what’s working or not working in your business.
4. Activity and Performance Tracking
Pick a CRM that can help you track and measure customer activities in your company — support requests, email responses, past purchases, etc. In my experience, this can help you and your team anticipate the needs of the customer and offer personalized upsell and cross-sell opportunities later in the customer life cycle.
In my opinion, it’s a plus if it also covers employee performance tracking, making it easier for employees to track their own activities and for employers and managers to track and measure individual and team productivity.
5. Multichannel Communication
Select a CRM with a multichannel communication system, such as a combination of phone calls, email, SMS, WhatsApp, social media, and live chat.
I’ve found this makes it easier to engage customers through their preferred channels. And since all communication is happening in one place, you’ll have a holistic view of how different customers engage with your business and be able to track everything faster
6. Automated Workflows
You can use automated workflows in a CRM to send outreach, schedule meetings, and manage communication, repetitive tasks, follow-ups, customer lifecycle, and so on. I think this feature helps ensure consistency, save time and energy, reduce mistakes and errors, and allow you to focus more of your time on building customer relationships.
7. Customization and Scalability
I suggest you look for a CRM that can be customized to meet your specific business needs in areas like data fields, dashboards, workflows, layouts, and so on. If this feature is absent, you may end up with a CRM with irrelevant features for your business. As a result, you may find that you wasted money.
Also, consider a CRM that can grow with your business. As your needs change, maybe your customer database has increased, or you need to add more users, your CRM should be able to cope without any adverse effect on its performance.
8. Third-Party Integrations
Select a CRM that integrates with existing business software and tools you’re already using — and even those you may use in the future. This will boost the capabilities of your CRM and help you avoid the stress of updating manually or switching between tools to get work done.
9. Mobile CRM
With so many professionals, teams, and businesses now working remotely, I recommend choosing a CRM with a solid mobile app. Make sure the app has all the CRM features and tools and can be accessed through both Android and iOS devices so you can work and sell from anywhere.
10. Sales, Marketing, & Customer Support Features
Depending on your needs and priorities, also consider features that can boost sales, marketing, and customer support management. This will include features for lead management, marketing automation, opportunity tracking, sales pipeline management, email marketing, ticket management, live chat, and so on.
Next, I’m going to share the top client management software that can help grow your business.
1. HubSpot CRM
The HubSpot all-in-one CRM platform for scaling businesses, from small- to midsize-businesses (SMB) to enterprise, is flexible, cohesive, and easy to use — it’s crafted in-house with your growth in mind. It includes features such as email tracking and notifications, prospect tracking, meeting scheduling, and even live chat so you stay connected to the most important part of your business — the customers.
You can integrate your HubSpot CRM with Gmail, Google Workspace, Office 365, and Outlook, so you’ll spend less time logging notes and more time building relationships.
With HubSpot, you’ll have enough access for unlimited users, data, and up to 1,000,000 contacts with no time limit or expiration date — whether you’re a team of 1 or 1,000.
If you need more functionality, check out the Starter Bundle for small businesses and startups. You can unlock premium CRM features that are available in the paid editions of Sales Hub.
Pricing
- Free: For up to five users
- Starter Customer platform: $15 per user/month, paid annually
What I like: It’s 100% free, easy to use and navigate, allows up to five users, and provides essential CRM features like sales, marketing, service, content, operations, and commerce tools at zero cost.
You can track and analyze sales activity in real time, use free ad management tools to draw more visitors to your site, grow your database with free forms and landing pages, use live chat to engage and convert visitors in real time, create personalized customer experiences throughout the customer journey, manage all customer communications from one universal inbox, and leverage over 1,500 integrations.
Best for: Any sized businesses and teams looking for an all-in-one CRM platform.
2. Keap
Wouldn’t it be nice to eliminate business chaos? Keap thinks so, too. This client management software and CRM does just that by helping businesses collect more leads, convert more clients, and create more fans.
I like that you won’t need another form builder (unless you want one) when using Keap. Custom forms can be embedded right onto your website landing pages, and they automatically trigger specific actions so your team can follow up on time, every time. After collecting those leads, use Keap’s email and SMS marketing tools to segment prospects based on specific attributes to drive greater sales.
If you’re running a smaller sales team, personalization may not be at the top of your list of priorities, so Keap lets you automate your sales follow-ups to turn more quality leads into customers. After this much quality client relationship management, those customers will eventually become the company’s best clients — fans.
Pricing
- There is a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
- Ignite: $299/month for two users + 1,500 total contacts
- Grow: $399/month for three users + 2,500 total contacts
- Scale: $599/month for five users + 5,000 total contacts
What I like: It’s an all-in-one CRM, sales, and marketing automation platform. You can automate new lead capture, appointment reminders, sales nurturing, purchase follow-ups, and more. Customers have access to a dedicated customer success manager, 24/7 chat support, U.S.-based phone support, and strategic coaching with a small business growth expert.
Best for: Small businesses, startups, and growing businesses.
3. ClickUp
ClickUp is the ultimate productivity software for managing accounts, growing your customer relationships, and working together all from a single platform. I appreciate that among ClickUp’s rich set of customizable features are over 15 unique ways to visualize all of your sales and client orders, including a list, calendar, table, or Kanban-like board view for any type of data.
Dashboards in ClickUp offer instant, real-time reporting and create high-level overviews of your customer’s lifetime values to stay on top of every deal.
I think ClickUp is great because it integrates with over 1,000 other work tools, including email, to fast-track and streamline your customer outreach by onboarding clients, updating tasks, and sending messages from a single, centralized work hub.
You can access tons of functional features to start building your customer database with ClickUp’s Free Forever plan or upgrade for even more advanced tools.
Pricing
- Free forever plan, best for personal use
- Unlimited: $7 per month/user
- Business: $12 per month/user
- Enterprise: Contact sales for pricing
What I like: I love that you can create your own customized CRM from scratch with ClickUp. How cool is that? But if that sounds overwhelming, maybe because you’ve no prior experience using a CRM or you want to save time and hit the ground running faster, you can start with a prebuilt free ClickUp CRM template and customize it for your specific needs.
Best for: Entrepreneurs and businesses looking for a combined CRM and project management software.
4. Nimble
Client management doesn’t only happen within a client management software system — social media has a place in the client relationship journey, too. I think Nimble is great because it captures prospective lead contact information using the Nimble Prospector browser extension. By simply hovering over the LinkedIn or Instagram profile of a professional you want to reach out to, you can cut the time spent on data entry in half.
With more than 160 apps available for integration, your team can unify client contact data using the systems you already know and love — like X, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
Nimble comes equipped with a calendar, activities tracker, and pipeline manager, so your team never misses an opportunity to connect with a prospect or existing client.
Pricing
- 14-day free trial
- $29.90 per user/month (save up to 17% with annual pricing)
What I like: Nimble CRM works with both Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. As a result, it can consolidate your contacts, emails, and calendars into a powerful force that boosts teamwork. You can save hours of data entry with Nimble’s prospector. Email support, weekly training webinars, daily live Q&A sessions, and 100+ articles and videos are also available.
Best for: Solopreneurs and small business teams looking for a social CRM with sales prospecting features.
5. Monday.com
Back in 2012, Monday.com was founded as a team management solution that connected employees with workplace processes. Now, the tool is used in several industries to manage, organize, and track workplace activity, production, and performance.
Once you sign up for Monday.com, you can choose a template depending on what industry you‘re in and why you’re using the tool. In regards to sales, Monday.com has three templates that can help your sales team: sales CRM, partner management, and sales assets.
I think the sales CRM template is one of the best tools for your team. I find it helps efficiently manage leads, customer relationships, sales pipelines, and tasks all in one place.
With lead management, you can create forms directly on Monday.com and place them on your website. Then, the submissions will be collected directly to your Monday.com board, and the tool will save all your contacts’ data and activity, including calls, emails, and meetings.
Additionally, in the sales CRM template, you can manage your sales pipeline with the Kanban view. Kanban is a technique for managing software efficiently. This view will help you see at a glance how many prospects you have and what stage they’re in.
Plus, the sales CRM organizes your deadlines, so you know what tasks need to get done for the day to move you toward the close.
Pricing
- Free forever plan, best for individuals
- Basic: $12 per user/month, three users minimum
- Standard: $14 per user/month, three users minimum
- Pro: $24 per user/month, three users minimum
- Enterprise: Contact sales
What I like: I like that you can streamline sales activities from pre- to post-sales, save time with extensive automations, and gain deep insights from comprehensive data visualizations.
With the intuitive and user-friendly interface, you can customize the look and feel of the CRM, even if you’re not tech-savvy. A template center with 200+ ready templates, a help center, a blog, a community, and 24/7 support are also great pluses, in my opinion.
Best for: Sales professionals and customer-facing teams.
6. Zendesk Sell
Zendesk was first created as a customer service tool but has since grown to include sales. I think the most unique feature is the focus on bringing sales and support teams closer together.
By combining its customer support and sales tools, your team can sell smarter, maintain context, collaborate, and delight customers.
For example, sales reps can see if a prospect or client opened a support ticket right in their contact record, so your salespeople have full visibility and context of a customer’s situation. Plus, their contact record keeps a history of all communication, so reps understand the past context.
Pricing
- 14 days free trial
- Sell Team: $25 per user/month
- Sell Growth: $69 per user/month
- Sell Professional: $149 per user/month
- Sell Enterprise: Starts from $219 per user/month
What I like: You can set overall sales goals, track your progress, and use the sales engagement tool to improve prospecting. I also like that you can automate tasks, get full pipeline visibility, deliver personalized experiences for potential and current customers, enjoy full functionality with the mobile app, and sell on the go from your mobile device.
Best for: Existing Zendesk users and customer-focused startups.
7. Pipedrive
Pipedrive is a CRM that provides features including pipeline management, chatbot, web forms, and AI sales assistance.
The AI-powered sales assist tool is one of the most unique features of this CRM, in my opinion. With Sales Assist, your reps will receive personalized tips and automation recommendations.
The AI sales mentor will analyze past performance and bring risks to your attention, suggesting new ways to boost your results. These tips will help your reps upskill without lengthy training and consulting, which I think is a great asset for any sales team.
Additionally, the AI sales mentor will also use algorithms to analyze your actions and find places that can be automated.
Pricing
- 14-day free trial. No credit card required.
- Essential: $14 per user/month
- Advanced: $29 per user/month
- Professional: $59 per user/month
- Power: $69 per user/month
- Enterprise: $99 per user/month
What I like: I like that Pipedrive is user-friendly and also easy to set up and navigate. You can customize it for your own unique sales process, visualize the sales pipeline in different ways, and get AI-powered personalized tips. Support channels available include phone, email, online chat, knowledge base, community, and academy.
Best for: Businesses and teams looking for a sales-focused CRM that’s beginner-friendly.
8. Zoho CRM
Zoho CRM provides sales automation, predictive sales, sales management, and multichannel communication.
I think multichannel communication is one of Zoho CRM’s strongest features. This enables sales reps to connect with customers, wherever they are.
For example, reps can contact prospects through channels including telephone, email, live chat, social media, and web forms. Plus, with the multichannel tool, reps can measure the effectiveness of their communication, finding the best time and channel to reach prospects.
To make multichannel communication possible, Zoho CRM integrates with several business applications, including Google Workspace, Ring Central, and SalesIQ. These integrations make it possible to communicate with prospects via email, phone, social media, and live chat.
Pricing
- 15-day free trial. No credit card required.
- Free plan: up to three users
- Standard: $18 per user/month
- Professional: $30 per user/month
- Enterprise: $45 per user/month
- Ultimate: $55 per user/month
What I like: Zoho CRM provides industry-specific solutions, has robust features you can customize to meet specific needs, and integrates with over 1,000 applications. I also like that the AI assistant, Zia, can help out in various ways.
I think Zoho also has great support options. With Classic support, paid subscribers can reach the support team through chat, email, phone call, or you can schedule a remote assistance session. Additional help resources like articles, ebooks, videos, tutorials, and webinars are also available.
Best for: Existing Zoho users and businesses looking for robust industry-specific CRM solutions.
9. Insightly
Insightly is a marketing automation and sales CRM software offering features like relationship linking, lead routing, and workflow automation.
With relationship linking and lead routing, your sales reps can follow up on warm leads right away. For example, leads are automatically routed to sales reps in real time depending on their activity, including emails, phone calls, or interactions with a marketing campaign.
In my opinion, the relationship linking tool is key because it helps your reps map and see the complex customer relationship. For instance, customers often communicate with other teammates, bosses, or other departments during their buyer‘s journey. Insightly helps you determine who’s who and builds a clear view of an organization’s structure and interaction with your brand.
Pricing
- 14-day free trial
- Free plan: up to two users
- Plus: $29 per user/month (billed annually)
- Professional: $49 per user/month (billed annually)
- Enterprise: $99 per user/month (billed annually)
What I like: Insightly is a beginner-friendly CRM that’s easy to adopt, navigate, and customize to your specific needs. It’s great for sales pipeline and lead management, real-time performance insights, and customer relationship management.
I like that with the Insightly mobile app, you can work on any device and manage everything on the move. It also integrates seamlessly with other Insightly products and thousands of third-party tools.
Best for: Growing businesses and sales teams looking for a mobile CRM with project management features.
10. Salesforce
Salesforce Sales Cloud is one of the top CRM software in the market today. It includes features such as contact management, opportunity management, lead management, email integration, and sales forecasting.
In my opinion, sales forecasting software is one of the top tools from Salesforce. With sales forecasting, you can get a real-time view of the forecast of all your sales reps, including in-line forecast adjustments and override visibility, depending on the management hierarchy.
For example, you can see the entire pipeline for your business, organized by sales rep, so you see who your top performers are. By tracking and forecasting your sales, you can set realistic goals and solve problems before they impact your revenue. Ultimately, I think tools like sales forecasting help management make decisions.
Pricing
- 30-day free trial. No credit card or installation required.
- Starter Suite: $25 per user/month (billed monthly or annually)
- Pro Suite: $100 per user/month (billed annually)
- Enterprise: $165 per user/month (billed annually)
- Unlimited: $330 per user/month (billed annually)
- Einstein 1 Sales: $500 per user/month (billed annually)
What I like: I like that Salesforce is a powerful CRM with comprehensive sales, marketing, service, and commerce features that can be customized for specific needs. There’s also built-in AI, automated activity capture, and a mobile app that allows you and your team to work and sell on any device from anywhere.
If you want to improve and extend these features further, lots of additional Salesforce products, add-ons, and apps are available.
Best for: Growing businesses, large sales teams, and existing Salesforce users.
11. Freshworks CRM
Freshworks CRM (formerly Freshsales) offers pipeline management, lead scoring, AI-powered insights, and built-in phone and email.
I think the best feature is the built-in phone and email. Rather than integrating with other platforms, your reps can make calls, send emails, and get in touch with prospects right in the CRM. To call prospects, you can purchase local and toll-free numbers inside Freshworks and assign them to sales reps, so they have a unique phone line.
Additionally, since communication happens right in the CRM, it’s automatically logged. Calls, emails, and any other activity are logged for you, eliminating timely manual data entry. A huge time-saver, in my opinion!
Pricing
- 21-day free trial, no credit card required.
- Free plan: three users
- Growth: $11 per user/month
- Pro: $47 per user/month
- Enterprise: $71 per user/month
What I like: It’s a simple CRM that’s user-friendly and great for beginners. Apart from the built-in chat, email, and phone, I like that you can automate repetitive tasks and plan your entire sales process with Kanban views. Freddy AI can assist you with contact scoring, offer insights and recommendations, identify and highlight the best leads and deals, and also make predictions. You can work and sell on the go with the mobile app, manage global transactions with over 150 currencies, and choose from over 10 languages to send emails, analyze reports, and more.
Best for: Small businesses, startups, and existing Freshworks users looking for a communication-focused CRM.
Client Management Is Better With a CRM
Client relationships are one of the most important aspects of a successful business, and they deserve a little more than a spreadsheet to manage them. That’s why a client relationship management software is essential for small, scaling, and enterprise organizations.
I think a CRM is a game changer because you can increase individual and team productivity, shorten the sales cycle, reduce waste, provide a fantastic experience for customers before, during, and after a sale, increase customer retention, boost sales, revenue, and profit, and grow your business faster.
I’m surprised by the huge number of CRM features available, the generous free plans offered by many, and the fact that some CRMs even have special prices and discounts for startups and nonprofits.
So, take advantage of these amazing opportunities. Identify specific features you need in a CRM, pick the best one for you, and confidently take your business to the next level.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in November 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.