The best CRM for startups

A CRM platform supercharges startups by merging tools and processes to prepare them for growth. Choose one of the best CRM tools for startups by adopting Pipedrive for your new company.

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What’s CRM for startups?

Customer relationship management (CRM) software streamlines your workflow and helps you quickly assess the health of your sales pipeline.

A startup CRM is growth-focused. This means it lets you oversee performance in a single platform, allowing you to identify opportunities and grow your business. In short, it ensures you keep your eyes on the prize and meet your goals.

Pipedrive’s sales CRM is a feature-rich yet surprisingly easy-to-use tool. It keeps you up to date with your pipeline management activities, tracks important customer data and helps you improve your business processes. It also keeps team members in sync with access to data like contact information, deal sizes and customer preferences.

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Pipedrive’s startup CRM features and add-ons

Email and communications

Streamline communication with email templates and automatic follow-up reminders. Seamlessly save every message, email, phone call and chatbot response to each contact.

Lead management

Use custom fields to collect the data that matters most. Import prospective customers into Pipedrive as leads or deals and prioritize your outreach efforts.

Actionable insights

Customize your dashboards for different sales metrics. Oversee the performance of individual products and adjust inventory and sales.

Automation

Eliminate repetitive tasks and streamline your process with automation. Reduce admin such as follow-up emails, task assignments, appointment scheduling and invoice generation.

Customization

Tailor your CRM solutions with customizable pipelines, labels, fields and more. Add, edit and move customer stages to reflect your sales process.

Sales forecasting

Boost your ROI with effective sales planning. Focus on the highest-value activities, prioritize deals likely to close and find new deals to work on.

How to find the best CRM for startups

You may be tempted by a CRM platform designed or priced for new businesses. However, as your business needs grow, you should look for flexible software features that fuel further growth.

The best CRM tools for startups have a few key features:

Sales reporting and sales forecasting: Use visual sales reporting to get an instant overview of your current deals and help forecast future sales.
Data entry automation: Eliminate admin work by automating reports and data collection.
Pipeline customization: Tailor your sales cycle stages towards lead generation and sales activities.
Ease of use: Onboard new sales reps quickly with a user-friendly interface.
Business data security: Prevent security breaches and get alerts for suspicious activity with built-in security features.

Why is a CRM important for startups?

It’s easy to get lost in a sea of tasks and clutter as a growing business. Pipedrive’s CRM software for startups helps guide new businesses toward success. It’s no wonder more than 100,000 companies globally seal their deals with Pipedrive.

Forecast your sales

Often, the only thing standing between you and sales excellence is clear data and actionable insights.

With the right CRM for startups, you can quickly and accurately identify problems and predict your future growth. Dig into the data to highlight weak links in your sales process and understand which sales activities bring the best and worst conversion rates.

Discover how to forecast with Pipedrive’s sales insights and reports.

Automate your pipeline

When you’re just starting your business, you might not have enough time or personnel to finish every task.

Still, with a bit of help, a small business can compete with a large corporation. Use your CRM for task management and streamline your workflow by automating pipeline stages to promote efficiency. Set triggers for desired actions and automate email marketing, task notifications and social media activity all within your CRM.

Pipedrive recommends popular sales automations so that you can focus time and energy on growing your revenue.

Keep track of communication

Like any other living being, your customer base needs consistent nurturing to thrive. But as you grow, it can be hard to stay in touch with each customer to offer the best customer support.

A CRM platform helps build and strengthen relationships by organizing conversations. Pipedrive’s email integration connects with your existing email client, (like Gmail or Microsoft Outlook) to sync, store and manage every message. View all your emails alongside sales call notes for more context about each prospect.

Centralize your customer support with Pipedrive’s communication management feature.

Manage your contacts

Getting new sales reps up to speed can affect down productivity, which, as a startup, you can’t afford.

With the right CRM, your new sales reps get instant access to historical data about your leads, prospects and customers, allowing them to shine in no time. They’ll quickly learn what your sales process looks like, what your customers care about and how your product makes a difference.

Make onboarding each new sales rep easier with Pipedrive’s user-friendly contact management feature.

Make your startup more efficient with integrations and add-ons

Strengthen your startup’s CRM system with powerful integrations. Save time and streamline your workflow by connecting Pipedrive with hundreds of popular apps and services.

Here are some integrations to help any startup or small business shine.

Zapier

Work faster and automate processes by connecting thousands of popular apps via Zapier directly with your Pipedrive CRM.

Access more tools with Pipedrive’s Zapier integration.

Web Visitors

Simplify your lead generation by capturing web visitors. Reveal which organizations are visiting your site, how they found you and what they engage with using Pipedrive’s Web Visitors add-on.

Slack

Forget lengthy emails and excessive meeting schedules. With Dealbot for Slack, your sales team can quickly and easily update managers on deal progress.

Keep in touch with Pipedrive’s Dealbot for Slack integration.

Asana

Supercharge your CRM by combining Pipedrive and a powerful project management tool. Stay organized and connect all your departments on one platform.

Improve your project management with Pipedrive’s Asana integration.

Plecto

Gain insights with visual, in-depth reports and customized dashboards. Easily share data to make sure everyone’s in the loop.

Keep the team updated with Pipedrive’s Plecto integration.

Campaigns by Pipedrive

Create attention-grabbing email campaigns with Pipedrive’s intuitive drag-and-drop email builder.

Use segmentation for targeted messaging and get real-time email marketing data with Pipedrive’s Campaigns add-on.

LeadBooster

Pipedrive’s LeadBooster add-on powers lead generation to feed your sales funnel and help your startup grow. Capture website visitors, find new prospects and shorten user journeys with this add-on to augment your sales funnel management.

Chatbot: Engage website visitors 24/7 and route leads to sales reps
Live Chat: Seamlessly switch from chatbot to sales rep
Prospector: Source quality leads from a database of over 400 million profiles
Web Forms: Embed and share forms to capture and store new leads

How Pipedrive helped one startup manage their time more efficiently

Fast-growing software startup DashThis had trouble nurturing its growing pool of customers. It needed a simple way to manage inquiries and keep track of support requests.

Pipedrive helped DashThis automate follow-ups and collate data in a centralized hub, making sure every customer received timely replies. Its in-house sales team used forecasting and automated administrative work to focus their efforts and help them scale fast.

“Pipedrive really ensures that I keep up the pace when trying to close a deal. With their workflows, I see what actions I need to take in order to sign up a client, and I never forget to follow up with them. No leads are left behind!”

Read the case study

How to set up your startup CRM software

Aligning your CRM tool with your sales process is the key to fueling your growth. Here are some tips to set your CRM up for success.

1. Identify the best CRM software for startups
2. Migrate existing data to your CRM
3. Customize your pipeline
Personalize your CRM solution to fit your specific sales pipeline management needs. Replicate your sales cycle in Pipedrive by customizing pipeline stages, adding custom fields and incorporating Pipedrive’s templates.

Set up separate workflows for prospects based on each stage of your buying journey. Get an overview of each lead, including how likely they are to convert and when to follow up to maximize your win ratio.
4. Add marketing automation and campaign reporting
Spend less time managing marketing activities and more time nurturing leads with automated campaigns and custom emails. Unlock intelligent insights to target hot leads and reach more customers.

Segment your contacts with custom fields. Ensure every marketing message reaches the leads and prospects most likely to convert. Schedule and monitor your social media without leaving Pipedrive with hundreds of smart integrations.
5. Manage your email inboxes
6. Integrate with your favorite software

CRM for startups FAQs

Is it too soon to invest in a CRM?
If you don’t have many customer relationships to manage, your instinct may be to wait on investing in a CRM. But if you wait to have more customers before you improve the customer experience, it might be too late.

Tracking and organizing your customer relationships early can help you get ahead of your competitors faster.

With a startup CRM, you can monitor every customer interaction, pain point, purchase and detail. An early start means you can tailor your customer conversations months and even years down the road.
Can I afford a CRM?
There’s no such thing as a high-quality free CRM. However, let’s consider what drives CRM pricing plans:
- Number of users
- Which features you need
- Monthly versus annual pricing
- Add-ons
Typical startup CRM systems have pricing ranges from $15 to $50 per month for each user. If you don’t have a large sales team yet, a CRM won’t cost you much. Even a relatively low investment can help you close deals faster and focus on customer retention.

As you get more customers and hire more people, the right CRM will support your growth.
Do we need a CRM for startups if our existing system works just fine?
Many startups default to a spreadsheet or a simple sales pipeline template to track leads, prospects and customers. This system may work for now, but think about what happens when you hire sales reps to scale your sales or an employee leaves the company.

Without a central hub for all your lead and customer details, you can become overly dependent on specific individuals to manage siloed information.

The best CRM system for startups keeps this data in a dedicated place accessible to the whole team and helps protect you from risk.

Used by over 100,000 companies in 179 countries

In the forecast view, we look at what deals are due to close this month, next month just to make sure everyone is really honest about what they should be working on.

Carolyn PearsonFounder, Maiden Voyage

One of the favorite features within Pipedrive is the email integration. It pulls all of the clients details in, so that we don’t have to think about it.

Erin and DrewFounders, Pro Arts

As a business owner, my favorite feature in Pipedrive is the statistics and being able to look at the dashboard and use those metrics to help each individual on the team.

Lisa CoyleCEO, 360 Payments

Spend less time on admin and more time growing your business!