Best Simple CRM Of 2024 – Forbes Advisor
At Forbes Advisor, we approach our best-of articles with a critical eye and with small and midsize businesses (SMBs) in mind. Given that this particular topic is focused on the best simple CRM, we whittled a long list of programs down to the 10 easiest-to-use options. From there, we looked at the various ways that a CRM makes it simple for users to learn and use. We also gave more credit to the CRMs that are affordable, functional, offer great support and let you connect the apps you already use.
Here’s a breakdown of how we scored our 15 criteria on a weighted scale.
Pricing
We gave higher scores to CRMs that offer affordable plans, free trials and free plans. Value is more about the functionality for the cost than the actual fee you pay, which we also considered. As far as affordability, we rated plans as being cheap, moderate and expensive and gave higher points for plans on the lower end of the cost scale. Pricing accounted for 20 percent of our weighted scoring.
Features
The only apps that made our list of the easiest-to-use CRMs include at least the basic tools a sales team would need in a CRM. Those that offer more functionality got more credit, but we were careful to not cross the line into too complex. Lots of features are great but only if you use them. Some of these features included pipeline management analytics tools, a document library and sales dashboards.
It’s also important that your CRM connects to your email addresses and calendar at least. We like CRMs that offer more integrations with apps that can bring in more contact info and helpful data, such as email marketing apps and accounting or project management tools. Open API is great, but if you have to configure these things yourself, you’re getting further away from simple CRM. We weighted features at 40% of our total score.
Third-party Reviews
We researched reviews from real users on third-party review sites Capterra and G2 to get honest opinions about each CRM software. This entailed ranking both the overall score from customers―focusing on those that were 3.5 out of 5 or higher on each site. These reviews accounted for 20% of the final score.
Expert Analysis
A CRM is easy to use when it offers an intuitive dashboard with features named and explained. It should be similar to software you’ve used before with prompts to adopt new features or tools. Ease of use was one of the key factors our experts looked for in a CRM as was its popularity, standout features and value for the price. Our expert analysis made up 20% of the total score.
