Five CRMs worth a look, and who each one suits

Search "best CRM" and you'll get a hundred ranked lists, plenty of them on sites that earn a commission when you sign up. That doesn't make them wrong, but it's worth knowing before you trust the order.

What follows is five established CRMs, in no particular order, and the kind of business I think each one suits, written for businesses that quote, where a sale takes weeks or months. I've left prices out because they change constantly and depend on how many people you've got and which features you switch on.

One thing up front. I couldn't find one that runs a whole small business, from the quote to the invoice to the work itself, at a price that made sense. Zoho comes closest. That's a big part of why we built our own, which I've written about separately.

HubSpot

HubSpot's strength is having marketing and sales in the same place. Email campaigns, website forms and the pipeline share one contact record, so when a quote is won you can see which campaign first brought that person in. You can start on free CRM tools and add the paid parts as you go.

Watch the bill. The paid marketing, sales and service products are priced separately, and the cost climbs as you go up tiers and add contacts. If all you need is a pipeline, you can end up paying for a marketing platform you barely touch.

Pipedrive

Pipedrive is built around the pipeline. Every deal is a card in a column, you drag it along as it moves, and it nudges you about the ones nobody has touched. It's quick to set up and sales teams tend to actually like using it, which matters, because a CRM nobody opens is just an expensive address book.

It suits a small sales team whose main headache is keeping track of quotes and follow-ups. It's lighter on marketing, so if you want campaigns and forms in the same place you'll be adding to it.

Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM is one part of a big family of Zoho products, including accounting, help desk and email marketing, which you can buy together as Zoho One. It's the one I mentioned up front, and it's very customisable for what it costs.

The catch is that flexibility cuts both ways. Set it up carelessly and it gets confusing fast, so the time you put into the setup decides most of what you get out of it.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales

If you already run on Microsoft 365, Dynamics is worth a look. It works closely with Outlook and Teams, and it connects to Microsoft's own business software, like Business Central, if you use that for accounts or stock.

It suits manufacturers and distributors that are already a Microsoft shop and want sales, stock and finance joined up. It's usually set up by a Microsoft partner, so budget for that as well as the licences.

Salesforce Sales Cloud

Salesforce is the most configurable of the five, with the biggest marketplace of add-ons (AppExchange). Pretty much anything a sales process needs can be built or bought for it.

It suits bigger sales teams with a complicated process and the budget for an administrator or an implementation partner. For a team of five it's more system than the job needs, and you pay for the extra and maintain it.

If you're a trade or service business

Plenty of Australian trade and field service businesses already run job software like simPRO or ServiceM8, which handles quoting, scheduling and invoicing. Before you buy a CRM, check how far your job software already gets you. The gap might just be tracking enquiries and following up quotes.

How I'd choose

Start with your process, not the products. Write down what happens from enquiry to paid invoice, then ask each vendor to show you that, on screen, with your own example.

Check how each one connects to what you already rely on. For most Australian small businesses that's Xero or MYOB, plus Gmail or Outlook. A CRM that can't see your email or your invoices leaves gaps somebody has to fill by hand.

Then trial it with real work. Load twenty live deals and have the people who'll actually use it run them for two weeks. If they open it without being reminded, you've probably found your CRM.