Looking for a simple, low cost CRM solution?
With annual licence fees for an enterprise-level CRM running to hundreds of pounds per user, and the need implementation, training and workshops – it’s no surprise to learn there’s a growing demand for simple, low cost CRM solutions.
If you don’t need all the features and complexity, then why should you pay for it?
We compare 3 of leading low cost CRM solutions, all costing under $150/£100/€100 per user per annum to see what you can get on a budget.
Best for Sales: OnePage CRM
If you’re looking for a CRM to help you raise the productivity and accountability of your sales team then OnePage CRM could be a great option.
OK, so it isn’t strictly contained within a single page. But if you can forgive that minor transgression you’ll find it simple and effective in keeping sales focused on the Next Action for each contact.
OnePage CRM is also no slouch when it comes to managing sales, giving a clear view of pipeline.
Sales people will love the ability enter the commission on each deal and see what their pipeline of earnings looks like.
OnePage CRM is available for just $12/€11/£9.75 per user a month which makes it an extremely cost effective way of raising your sales game.
If you want to try it out then register now for a 21-day free trial (no credit card required) or to find our more you can read our in-depth product review here.
Best for Ease-of-Use: Capsule CRM
Capsule CRM addresses one of the biggest issues you’ll face when rolling out a CRM – user adoption.
There’s no point in having lots of fancy-pants features if no-one uses them, so Capsule built a CRM with an almost zero learning curve.
There’s a beautiful simplicity to Capsule CRM that users find really easy to get on with.
It’s super simple to add notes, documents, and create tasks for any follow up actions.
What the product gives back is an easy to digest view of contact with each customer, and by making it easy to get the entire business involved its possible to achieve a true 360 degree view.
Capsule CRM is designed to be used by everyone in the company, but they haven’t forgotten about the specific needs of sales and support teams with the ability to create deals and support tickets.
Capsule CRM isn’t just simple to use, you can also customise it for your business by adding a range of custom fields and using them to build powerful reports.
And the beautiful simplicity also extends to pricing.
You can get a 2 user account with up to 250 contacts and 10MB of storage completely free.
Then when you reach the stage of needing a paid account it still isn’t going to hurt your wallet with pricing set low at just £8/month per user (GBP Sterling).
Sign up now for free or to find our more read our in-depth product review here.
Best for Marketing & E-Commerce: Agile CRM
Agile CRM is an enterprise level product, but qualifies for this list on the back of their free for 10 users plan.
Sales, Service and Marketing functionality is integrated around a shared database of Contacts, and even on the free plan you get access to enterprise-level functionality like two-way email integration for Gmail users.
The real magic of Agile CRM is in it’s marketing capability, with a plethora of video, landing pages, forms and web rules that enable you to push context sensitive notifications to website users.
With the tracking code installed in email and web pages, you can trigger a joined up Campaign of email, web and sales interactions automatically.
Getting sales and marketing working together can be quite a challenge, but Agile CRM gives you the opportunity to define the optimum customer journey and back it up with automated communications and tasks for your sales team.
Of course this isn’t entirely altruistic on the part of the Agile CRM, and the free plan has some limitations on the extent to which you can use the automations.
It’s clearly something they think users will be happy to pay to use more of once they have tried it out.
You will get a lot further for free with 10 users on Agile than you will with other enterprise level CRMs, and even when you find yourself wanting some more automated marketing the entry level is fairly gentle with pricing from as little as $8.99/month for the Starter plan.
Sign up to get 10 users for free, or read our in-depth product review.
Conclusion
If you don’t have the appetite for an enterprise level CRM there are a raft of extremely good products to choose from at a fraction of the cost.
As with most software products the time and data you commit to them will soon outweigh the financial investment, so it’s really important to consider how well a product is likely to meet your objectives and take the time shortlist and trial 2 or 3 before making a final decision.
