Managing contacts involves keeping track of customer details like phone numbers and email addresses, which helps businesses build effective relationships. AI-driven CRM solutions are projected to increase global company revenues by $1.1 trillion by the end of 2021. Today, I’ll introduce some of the most popular contact management tools available, explaining what they excel at, their features, and pricing options. Afterward, I’ll briefly discuss CRM software and answer common questions related to it.
What Are the Top Contact Management Tools?
Here are some of the leading contact management programs currently available in the market.
Ideal for organizing contact details and managing sales deals.
Monday.com provides a centralized platform to store all your contact data securely, allowing you to stay updated on every transaction. It enables quick identification of contacts’ roles in deals and keeps track of all communications, making it easier to nurture relationships and close deals. The platform also features a visual timeline to monitor ongoing interactions and allows customization of boards to suit specific needs, providing a quick overview of essential contact information to improve engagement.
Key Features:
Easy lead capture through embedded forms on your website, with submissions tracked centrally.
Customizable columns to monitor deal stages, contact types, or products.
Flexible visualization options to organize your workflows intuitively.
Automation tools that streamline routine tasks and minimize errors, saving time and effort.
Pricing:
Monday.com offers a free trial for 14 days to explore its features, with a forever free basic plan available. Paid plans are designed for teams, starting at three seats:
Individual: Free
Basic: $8 per seat per month
Standard: $10 per seat per month
Pro: $16 per seat per month
Enterprise: Custom pricing — contact their sales team for details.
Pipedrive offers a clean and user-friendly interface that makes managing your sales process straightforward. You can easily define the stages of your pipeline, add deals, and move them along toward closing with simple drag-and-drop actions. Its design minimizes manual input, enabling quicker workflows. This contact management system helps you stay focused on actions that turn leads into customers by allowing you to prioritize calls, emails, and meetings efficiently. The platform also provides clear analytics, allowing you to measure your sales performance against targets, effectively making it a comprehensive sales management tool.
Key Features
Managing leads and closing deals becomes seamless as these are automatically incorporated into your sales pipelines. Automate routine administrative tasks to free up your time and leverage the platform’s AI to gain insights. Some of Pipedrive’s core features include creating follow-up reminders for each deal, providing full transparency to improve confidence, integration with mobile apps, personalized reports, scheduling management, communication tracking, and automation of repetitive tasks.
Pricing Options
Pipedrive operates on a subscription model, with options for monthly or annual billing. All plans are compliant with GDPR and include round-the-clock customer support. The pricing tiers are as follows:
– Essential Plan: $15 per user/month or $12.50 annually.
– Advanced Plan: $29 per user/month or $24 per user/month billed annually.
– Professional Plan (recommended): $59 per user/month or $49.90 per user/month paid annually.
– Enterprise Plan: $99 per user/year, with a minimum of ten users required.
Additionally, Pipedrive offers Leadbooster, a four-in-one lead generation toolset billed annually at $32.50 per company, to boost your lead acquisition efforts.
Kickstart your sales management with Pipedrive today.
3. Keap
Best For Marketing Automation
Keap is a cloud-based sales and marketing platform designed to streamline your business activities. It’s easy to use and combines customer relationship management (CRM), automated marketing, and more, helping eliminate chaos and save time in managing customer interactions.e-commerce functionalities.
Startups, beginner marketers, and small to mid-sized businesses often depend on this platform to simplify their sales processes and enhance customer experience. It offers easy management of order fulfillment, payments, and inventory for online stores.
Previously called Infusionsoft, Keap has over two decades of industry experience. Throughout this time, it has supported thousands of entrepreneurs in increasing sales by helping them generate more leads, convert prospects into clients, and build a loyal customer base.
Features:
Keap provides a comprehensive set of tools designed to make your marketing efforts seamless and effective. It automates various tasks and behaviors to boost sales and engagement.
Below are some of the key features offered by Keap:
Enables creation of custom forms
Offers quick actions directly from CRM contact records
Integrates CRM with marketing functions
Streamlines client conversion processes
Prevents follow-up loss
Connects with PayPal, WePay, and Stripe for faster payments
Optimized for mobile devices
Proven reliability and expertise
Pricing:
Keap offers three plans tailored to different business sizes and needs, each supporting up to 500 contacts and a single user. Additional users cost $30 each.
1. Lite Plan at $79/month
Ideal for startups and solo entrepreneurs
Includes basic CRM, automation, and email tools
2. Pro Plan at $159/month
Designed for growing companies
Helps automate sales pipelines and marketing efforts
3. Max Plan at $199/month
Best suited for established businesses and teams
Offers secure payment integration, advanced automation, and e-commerce features
Freshworks CRM is a detailed contact management platform tailored to help sales and marketing teams deliver personalized experiences. Utilizing Predictive Contact Scoring, it ranks contacts based on engagement levels, facilitating better lead conversion. The system groups contacts according to their behavior or categorization, enabling targeted email campaigns.
An innovative feature is Freddy, an AI-powered assistant that analyzes data to suggest the best next steps to help drive conversions. With this platform, building lasting relationships is easier, as it consolidates customer interactions, social media profiles, and touchpoints into a single view.
Features:
Freshworks acts as a contact management solution that automatically imports contacts from emails and assists in nurturing customer relationships through real-time insights. It helps businesses understand their customers better and run targeted campaigns efficiently.
Key contact management features include:
Consolidates and unifies contact data
Identifies the most promising leads
Automates data entry and sales processes
Monitors sales and marketing communication history
Includes AI-powered assistant for smarter decision-making
Enables creation of targeted marketing campaigns
Pricing:
You can choose any of Freshworks’ paid cloud subscription plans listed below to better coordinate your sales and marketing efforts.
The Growth Plan is priced at $35 per month or $29 annually. It is designed for small, rapidly expanding businesses, supporting up to 1,000 marketing contacts and offering features such as contact, deal, and account management.
The Pro Plan costs $85 per month or $69 per year and is suited for larger marketing and sales teams, allowing for up to 3,000 marketing contacts.
The Enterprise Plan is available for $149 monthly or $125 annually, featuring support for up to 5,000 marketing contacts. Start using Freshworks CRM today to streamline your customer engagement.
Zoho Contact Manager is an ideal CRM solution for small to large businesses, helping manage sales, customer support, marketing, and inventory on a single contact management system. It integrates smoothly with platforms like Zoho Desk, Zendesk, and Salesforce Desk, facilitating seamless data sharing and a consistent customer experience across different channels. Zoho’s AI assistant offers insights into the best times to contact customers for sales opportunities or issue resolution by analyzing communication patterns and suggesting optimal contact times via email or SMS.
Zoho CRM provides tools to enhance email marketing strategies, such as analyzing open rates and suggesting effective templates to maximize response rates. Its features include support for one-click calling, a comprehensive view of customer data, meeting recordings, real-time notifications, multi-channel communication, and sales automation. Pricing begins with a free plan limited to 20 subscribers or customers. Upgraded options include the Basic Plan at $59/month or $49/year, accommodating 500 customers and three users, with three automated workflows. The Standard Plan costs $119/month or $99/year, supporting 2,000 customers, five users, and ten workflows. The Professional Plan is priced at $299/month or $249/year for up to 5,000 customers and ten users, with ten workflows. For larger enterprises with over 5,000 customers, custom pricing options are available.
HubSpot CRM is primarily designed for sales teams, offering tools to streamline the customer relationship process and improve sales efficiency.
The Hubspot CRM system is completely free to use, providing essential tools for managing customer interactions and sales pipelines. However, to access advanced features, users must subscribe to one of the paid plans listed below.
The Starter Plan costs $45 per month or $540 annually and includes 1,000 marketing contacts. It also removes branding from email campaigns, live chat, and forms, offering email and in-app support. The Professional Plan is priced at $800 per month or $9,600 per year, supporting up to 2,000 marketing contacts. It features omni-channel marketing automation, customized reports, and campaign tracking. The Enterprise Plan, at $3,200 monthly or $38,400 annually, provides for up to 10,000 contacts and includes advanced analytics, Salesforce integration, and comprehensive team, brand, and lead management tools.
Moving on to another popular CRM, Insightly is best suited for project management. It’s a unified platform that transforms sales deals into projects while maintaining detailed customer data. Insightly tracks project milestones, manages workflows, and seamlessly integrates with other CRM systems to ensure projects are completed on time. The platform simplifies your business processes to help close deals more quickly and allows for customization of workflows and dashboards according to your specific needs. Users can create visual data reports to monitor progress and share these insights with team members effortlessly through drag-and-drop features.
Insightly emphasizes security and offers features dedicated to protecting customer information. It also includes capabilities like lead routing and automation workflows. Additional features include real-time email tracking, organizing workflow tasks, customer relationship linking, custom app development, drag-and-drop customization, and comprehensive data and lead management.
Details about Insightly’s pricing are also available, providing options suitable for various business sizes and needs.
Insightly provides cost-effective subscription plans that are easy on your budget. You can begin by requesting a demonstration or signing up for a free trial by creating an account.
Once you decide to fully commit to the platform, you can opt for a paid plan and enjoy additional features: the Plus Plan at $29 per user monthly, the Professional Plan at $49 per user monthly, and the Enterprise Plan at $99 per user monthly. Regardless of the plan you select, billing is processed annually.
Salesforce CRM is ideal for both small and large organizations, offering a cloud-based solution that emphasizes sales and customer relationships. Whether you’re a small business or an enterprise, Salesforce’s platform caters to specific needs by managing sales, marketing efforts, and analytics seamlessly. The platform is only available via SaaS deployment, accessible on any device including iOS and Android. It provides a comprehensive technology infrastructure covering databases, security, workflows, and user interfaces. Salesforce Sales Cloud assists small businesses in managing contacts, tracking sales performance, and generating leads, while Salesforce Community Cloud allows broader access to customer data and enterprise support.
The features of Salesforce CRM include predictive lead scoring to help support teams act efficiently, task management, performance reporting, contract handling, API access, integration capabilities, quotation processing, team-selling functionalities, and deployment through SaaS.
Pricing options are flexible, catering to businesses needing only partial CRM functionalities. Plans are billed annually, customizable, and include the following tiers: the Essentials Plan at $25 per user monthly, offering a unified sales and support application with email integration and account management; the Professional Plan at $75 per user monthly, suitable for teams of any size and offering collaborative forecasting and lead registration; the Enterprise Plan at $150 per user monthly, providing a customizable CRM with automation features; and the Unlimited Plan at $300 per user monthly, which includes unlimited support and 24/7 assistance.
CRM software, or customer relationship management software, is a tool designed to streamline business interactions with customers. Over time, it has evolved from manual notes to sophisticated systems that automatically record customer data from platforms like LinkedIn and contact directories. These platforms offer real-time insights into customer interactions, help prioritize sales opportunities, and enable team collaboration. They also store important customer information, including names, contact details, and preferences, to facilitate seamless service.
Who benefits from CRM systems? Any business or organization looking to improve sales, enhance customer service, or grow their operations can gain from using CRM software. Proper contact management software helps small and large enterprises maintain strong customer relationships and identify potential sales opportunities.
Calculating CRM costs involves considering the subscription model, which is billed either yearly or monthly. The price is typically per user, so to estimate the total investment, multiply the per-user fee by the number of team members requiring access. Many contact management tools include integrations like APIs and workflow automation, which make accessing and organizing customer data easier, maintaining efficient customer relationships.
In conclusion, CRM technology is continually advancing, incorporating voice recognition, social media integration, and self-service features. This growth is expected to enhance the functionality and usefulness of these systems. If your goal is to manage customer relationships effectively and convert leads, consider options like Zoho Contact Manager for comprehensive CRM, Pipedrive for sales pipeline management, Freshworks CRM for lead conversion, Hubspot CRM for sales-focused operations, Insightly for project management, Salesforce for versatile needs, or Keap for marketing automation. You’re likely to find a platform tailored to your specific business needs among these choices.