Startup CRMs: The Ultimate Guide to Selecting Startup CRMs with 14 CRM Software Examples

Selecting the right CRM will have a significant impact on the success of building and scaling your startup. This comprehensive guide explores the top startup CRMs tailored to various use cases. Whether you're seeking to visualise actionable sales insights, provide efficient customer support, or build seamless recruiting or fundraising pipelines, we've got you covered.

Why Do Startups Need a CRM?

CRMs enable startups to manage relationships integral for accelerating growth, while increasing operational efficiency within teams. CRMs enable teams to achieve ambitious targets by centralising contact and company data, building pipelines for sales, recruiting, fundraising, partnerships etc., and scaling your communication efforts. On the operations side, CRMs provide analytics reports for business intelligence, automate repetitive tasks and optimise workflow management.

Which Startup Pain Points Do CRMs Solve?

Most startups face several growth and operational challenges that - you guessed it - can be solved with the right CRM tool. CRMs tackle the following pain points for startups:

Delivering the best customer experience: great customer service strengthens customer loyalty and increases their Net Promoter Score (NPS), which drives organic growth. CRMs help by centralising customer interactions and personalising support so startups can engage with clients in a more meaningful way. Hubspot found that excellent customer support increases revenue by 2-7% and profitability by 1-2%.‍
Reducing information asymmetry: if data points on leads, customers or partners are stored in silos or inconsistently recorded, this results in missed opportunities, reputation damage, and sluggish project execution. CRMs address this by centralising all team activities while offering project management and collaboration features.‍
Making data driven decisions: without the analytics layer offered by most CRM tools, evaluating your team's performance to identify causes of problems or success is extremely challenging. Therefore, a CRM’s real-time insights on customer queries, sales trends, and marketing performance are essential. ‍
Hiring the right talent: competition for top talent is intense, so recruiting CRMs help streamline the recruitment process by personalising mass reach-outs, shortlisting potential candidates, building recruiting pipelines and more. ‍
Scaling operations efficiently: as startups experience rapid growth, operational efficiency is key. CRMs act as a single source of truth for all business relationships, optimising workflows and project management. CRM tools ensure a smooth employee handover process that maintains continuity in customer service and project management.

What To Consider When Choosing a Startup CRM?

Unfortunately, no CRM will have it all. Depending on your intended CRM use-case(s), select one or multiple CRM tools with the optimal combination of features. Here is a checklist of what to consider when choosing a CRM software:

Intuitive UI/UX: a clear and intuitive interface saves precious time. Plus, a CRM that’s enjoyable to use increases team productivity.‍
High degree of automation: without the burden of manual data entry, team members can dedicate more time to customers, partners and investors. ‍
Extensive integrations: enable teams to streamline repetitive tasks by integrating with other workflow tools like Slack, Google Workspace etc. ‍
Bang-for-your-buck pricing: CRM tools should generate more value than their cost. Many CRMs offer freemium models, so you can try them before paying.‍
Granular permission controls: manage access rights to keep communication as well as certain contact or company lists visible only for relevant teams e.g. customer support just sees headings of investor emails. This reduces the risk of data leakages or misuse.

If you want more detail, check out the CRM landscape outlined in Which Type of CRM Is Best For You?

Top Startup CRMs for 5 Most Common Use Cases

The selected CRM software will play a significant role in the startup’s success. To simplify your search, here are the top startup CRMs for the 5 most common use cases: sales & marketing, customer support, fundraising & investor relations, recruiting and lead generation. Given that most CRM software is highly specialised, some startups use multiple CRM tools.

1. Sales CRMs & Marketing CRMs

This space is by far the most crowded, as every startup engages in sales and/or marketing. These CRMs typically offer lead generation and tracking, sales pipeline management and personalised mass outreach. Since sales and marketing teams often collaborate, some CRMs address both teams’ needs with a comprehensive selection of features, whereas others focus exclusively on one.

Hubspot: with the Sales, Marketing (and Customer Service) Hubs, Hubspot has one of the largest collections of features in a single CRM. Paid plans for small teams start at $30/month for 2 users (or $50/month billed annually), although the Hubspot for Startups program gives eligible startups between 30-90% off in the first year and smaller continued discounts in the following years. Hubspot Academy provides users with tons of guidance for maximising the CRM’s value. Hubspot also excels for its 1400+ integrations, which particularly help sales teams centralise data from multiple platforms.
Pipedrive: a flexible sales-focused CRM with plans starting at $15/month per user. With visual dashboards and personalised reports, it is easy to track team progress. Additionally, advanced pipeline functionality provides detailed presentations of real-time sales cycles. Although the lower-tier plans are more affordable than other CRMs’ cheapest options, they have usage and feature limits.
Zoho: a super customisable and easy-to-use CRM with sales and marketing automation features. Although plans (billed annually) start cheap at $14 a month per user, add-on modules cost extra in all plans and can make the CRM pretty expensive. Zoho offers AI-powered features, but only for the top two plans.
MailChimp: owning 73% of the email market share, MailChimp is a go-to for email campaigns. However, it also operates as a full marketing CRM with customisable message templates, analytics dashboards, basic automation features and extensive segmentation options for leads and customers. With a popular free version and paid plans starting at $11/month (for 3 users), MailChimp is very affordable. However, multifaceted CRMs with higher prices are arguably better value for money due to the bundled product offer: sales, marketing and customer support in one.

2. Customer Service CRMs

Although a handful of sales and marketing CRMs like Hubspot offer customer service capabilities, customer service CRMs tend to offer more tailored features: collect feedback, build 360° customer profiles, distribute market studies and respond to enquiries.

Zendesk: a highly customisable CRM with 500-1000 integrations and AI bots offered in all plans, which start at €19/month per user. Notably, eligible early-stage startups get 6 months free. The interface is intuitive and multilingual, so agents can work in their own language. Zendesk is particularly strong in its ticket management features, which allow the team to efficiently track, assign, prioritise and resolve customer issues, with permission controls to collaborate with different teams.
Freshdesk: the free plan and user-friendly CRM interface are ideal for startups. With the Freshworks for Startups programs, eligible startups get up to 90% off in the first year and more discounts in following years, as well as a dedicated onboarding consultant and a mentorship community. Freshdesk stands out for its AI bot Freddy, who automates repetitive tasks and handles omnichannel communication, although it is only offered in the most expensive plan ($119/month per user).
Messagebird: a highly-rated omnichannel CRM for customer service (and marketing) most liked for its Whatsapp, SMS and voice call channels. Automated support and chatbots power customer interactions and user notifications. Their pricing model is opaque and many customer reviews report that the cost is high relative to alternatives like Respond.io.
Respond.io: a multi-purpose omnichannel standalone CRM for customer service, as well as sales and marketing communications, via Whatsapp, SMS, Messenger, Telegram, WeChat among others. Apart from offering a mature standalone CRM software, respond.io has useful integrations with Salesforce, Hubspot and Pipedrive to enhance your existing CRM functionalities. There are three pricing tiers: €79/month with 10 users, €249/month with 25 users, and custom pricing for larger enterprises.

3. CRM for Investor Relations & CRMs for Fundraising

Fundraising CRMs can be used to nurture long term relationships with investors. They ultimately simplify relationship management with potential and existing angel investors, family offices and venture capital funds.

Attio: a super flexible CRM built specifically for startups. Attio shines for its relationship intelligence, enabling users to understand strongest connections among team members and have full visibility of interactions. Eligible startups benefit from $5k in credit to use on the paid plans, starting at $34/month per seat (or $29/month/seat billed annually). Despite limited features and seats, the free plan includes all contact enrichment features, so it can still be useful. Its Chrome extension is unreliable for pulling contact data from LinkedIn, email and other platforms.
folk.app: a Notion-resembling CRM that offers startups basic professional relationship management features e.g. teams can build fundraising pipelines. Thanks to its Chat GPT integration and LinkedIn chrome extension, folk.app makes it easier to import and categorise contacts. Unfortunately, the Chat GPT company data enrichment is semi-reliable and incorrectly labels some industries. On the bright side, deduplicate detection of contacts works well.

4. Recruiting CRMs

These recruitment CRMs reduce the need for external headhunters and streamline internal recruitment processes. They can build recruiting pipelines, discover candidates, collect applications, personalise reach-outs and automate rejections.

TalentLyft: the recruitment CRM uses an omnichannel recruiting strategy to reach active and passive job seekers through free and premium job boards (that TalentLyft has discounts for), social media, external agencies, career events and more. It sources candidates from LinkedIn, Xing, Twitter, Github and Stackoverflow, sends bulk personalised emails, and tracks prospects’ engagement. Startups can also build talent pools based on current and future hiring goals by segmenting candidates with filters such as location, skills, disqualification reason and source of application. Pricing plans are based on the number of active jobs, starting at $41/month for 2 jobs.
Dover: a “recruitment orchestration platform” that scales and accelerates recruitment processes by building careers pages, automating personalised reach-outs, coordinating interviews and more. Importantly, Dover uses precise search criteria to source high-quality candidates through publicly available sources (LinkedIn, Indeed, TripleByte, personal websites) and integration with Greenhouse. Although many reviews mention the cost is too high for early-stage startups, the Applicant Tracking System (ATS), Sourcing Copilot and Visual Explorer are all completely free and aimed towards early-stage startups.

5. CRM Add-Ons for Lead Generation

Although a handful of sales and marketing CRMs provide some lead generation capabilities, there are add-on CRM tools built solely for prospect discovery. These platforms are not standalone CRMs, but an API integration to your existing sales and marketing CRM software.

Apollo.io: an all-in-one sales intelligence platform with a huge database of over 260 million contacts and 60 million companies. Users can identify potential customers in the market, connect with contacts, and build modern go-to-market strategies. Although the features arguably justify the price, the software can still be expensive for a startup, starting at $49/month per user.
Clearbit: a B2B marketing intelligence platform that enriches customer profiles within your existing CRM, tracks pricing page visits and frequent product pageviews to identify leads’ buying intent and de-anonymises web traffic. Clearbit enriches lead information in many CRMs like Hubspot, Pipedrive, Attio, Superhuman etc., while also offering workflow integrations with Slack and Zapier. There are two known drawbacks based on customer reviews. First, Clearbit always updates your full database of client leads, and since pricing is volume-based, it can quickly become quite expensive. Second, the company data enrichment is biassed towards the US market.
Lusha: particularly easy-to-use, with a very user-friendly interface and various integrations including Salesforce, Pipedrive, Zoho and Hubspot. The sales intelligence solution reports actionable lead and buyer intent data, identifies the sources that generate the most leads and offers “razor-sharp filters” to build 1000-prospect lists. Although Lusha’s data enrichment accuracy of 81% is average for the industry, multiple reviews complain about incorrect contact details. Plus, if you want to track thousands of prospects, the credit per contact pricing (starts at $29/month per user for 480 credits) can become expensive.

Startup CRM Options For Tight Budgets?

If your CRM use cases are very basic or the budget is too tight, no-code CRMs are a great way to go. Tools like Notion and Airtable are multi-purpose and significantly cheaper than the more specialised CRM tools. Although no-code CRM features may not be as sophisticated, startups can still manage contacts, build pipelines and automate some tasks. These are an upgrade from Excel or Google Sheets.

How Does Tiva Supercharge Startups?

With Tiva, startups can leverage their team’s network for multiple use cases: investor relations, fundraising, recruiting, partnerships and more. Tiva offers a comprehensive set of features tailored for startups that don’t exist collectively in any other CRM:

Your team’s entire professional network in one place: Tiva centralises contacts from a variety of platforms including LinkedIn, private and company emails, calendars, phone contacts and more.
Extensive contact & company enrichment: sophisticated integrations with LinkedIn, Crunchbase, Chat GPT, etc. provide insights about dates of interactions, career experience, number of employees, funding round outcomes and more.
Advanced search capabilities: easily search for relevant contacts or companies using more than just their names, with custom or auto-generated tags, industry, location or calendar events.
Dynamic lists: smart lists that update themselves automatically as new contacts are added to your network (via email or on LinkedIn) who match the parameters you pre-define. For example, everyone with the keywords “venture capital”, “vc”, “vc investor” is added to the “VC Investor” list.
Proactive notifications: receive alerts and updates on key network changes and events you want to track. This way you can reach out to the right people at the right moment and receive news in real-time. For example, a startup can receive updates on competitors' funding rounds, product launches, and new hires to ensure they remain competitive.
No CRM data decay: a CRM data management survey found that CRM data quality deteriorates by 34% annually. Thankfully, Tiva detects profile changes on other platforms like LinkedIn and automatically updates the contact’s information in its CRM.