In our independent editorial review of retail CRM solutions, learn about the top options along with their primary use cases.
Sales pipeline software are CRMs offering visual, customizable pipelines that help salespeople manage leads, opportunities, and customer relationships throughout the sales process. The top pipeline software also provide sales forecasting and analytics tools, basic marketing functionality, workflow automation, and more. To help you choose the right one, we’ve developed our list of the best pipeline software available, including an overall winner.
Here are the six best pipeline software for sellers and teams:
While several sales pipeline software scored highly in one category or another, we found that the overall best option is Zoho CRM, scoring the highest for its core features and level of customization and tying for cost and integrations. Check out how each software scored across all six categories below, including a summary of features, pricing plans, and primary use cases. To see how we evaluated each option, jump down to our explanation.
Note: All per-user prices are with a one-year commitment unless noted.
Provides highly-customizable features focused on sales, marketing, and analytics.
Price Range: Free to $52 per user, per month (15- to 30-day free trial)
Zoho CRM is fully-featured sales and marketing software with a multichannel lead management system. Its smart web forms can capture leads from social media and landing pages, then place them into your sales pipeline and send them automatic, relevant nurturing emails. As you convert those leads into prospects and customers, track your progress using sophisticated but affordable pipeline tools such as list views, reporting dashboards, and AI sales forecasting.
Even though Zoho CRM takes our top spot, some of its tools are difficult to use. If easy-to-use software and great customer support for setup are important to you, check out EngageBay.
Features simple yet highly-integrated tools for automating sales and marketing processes.
Price Range: Free to $91.99 per user, per month
EngageBay is an intuitive all-in-one CRM with comprehensive tools to automate your sales pipeline and marketing processes. Use its marketing automations like a social suite to launch campaigns on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn plus email sequences to customize emails for certain segments. Then use its sales automation features like appointment scheduling, deal management, and 360° customer view to track deals through your pipeline.
Although EngageBay has powerful sales and marketing automation features, it doesn't have a built-in AI-powered sales assistant. If having an AI companion for your sales efforts is important to you, check out Freshsales, or try Zoho CRM for both sales and marketing AI tools.
Helps you manage multiple sales pipelines efficiently through smart automation features.
Price Range: Free to $69 per user, per month (21-day free trial)
Freshsales is a visual sales pipeline software that uses AI-powered sales tools to help you nurture leads and close deals faster. Freddy AI's deal insights help teams analyze historical customer data through email content, call transcripts, and interactions and assigns prediction tags to automatically categorize leads. Using these analyses, you can prioritize promising leads in your pipeline by identifying how and when to try to convert them into prospects or customers.
While Freshsales has excellent AI-powered sales tools, it offers a limited amount of unique AI interactions even in its highest tiers. If having more of these is essential for you, check out Zoho CRM for its Zia AI assistant.
Offers powerful tools for storing, managing, and visualizing unlimited contacts.
Price Range: Free to $24+ per user, per month (14-day free trial)
monday sales CRM is a highly-customizable software offered by monday.com featuring colorful boards that help teams keep track of leads and prospects. Its visual contact management tool provides a full picture of the sales process with an instant overview of contact details, deal progress, and more. Use its kanban-style boards to move deals into the next stage of your sales pipeline, then see each lead’s status and follow-up deadlines via color-coded status tags.
While monday sales CRM's free plan allows you to store up to 1,000 contacts, it lacks certain automations and other features that many CRMs tend to offer. If you’re looking for a more robust CRM that's still very visual, check out Pipedrive's tiers and add-ons.
Provides robust add-ons for sales pipeline management and lead generation.
Price Range: $14.90 to $99 per user, per month (14-day free trial)
Pipedrive is a visual software that includes powerful pipeline management, lead generation, and sales automation features. One of its defining features is the ability to pay for add-on upgrades a la carte, such as LeadBooster, which captures high-quality inbound and outbound leads into your pipeline using chatbots, prospector tools, and web forms. Its Campaigns add-on then helps you create and send customizable email campaigns to segmented lists based on engagement.
Although Pipedrive doesn't offer a free plan, its most affordable tier includes customizable pipelines and an AI-powered sales assistant. However, lower tiers have limited reporting and forecasting features. For these tools, check out Freshsales, which also has add-ons.
Offers a free-for-life plan with robust sales and marketing features, among others.
Price Range: Free to $1,200 per month (Sales Hub)
HubSpot CRM is a fully-featured free software for sales, marketing, and service. Add deals to a visual pipeline from contact records, then the CRM will autopopulate them with relevant info to eliminate manual data entry. Also included in the free tier are pipeline tools like custom fields, reports and dashboards, and email templates. If you upgrade into Sales Hub for more users or features, you’ll maintain access to its free marketing, service, CMS, and operation tools.
While HubSpot offers a robust free plan, its higher tiers and upgrades can get pricier than other software. For those needing more cost-effective yet feature-rich upgrade options, try Zoho CRM for sales and marketing tools or Freshsales for more sales-focused features.
The best sales pipeline software offer features such as:
Sales pipelines are visual representations of your sales process stages and where each lead is within them. Pipeline management tools help sales reps track these stages and identify bottlenecks and opportunities to close more deals.
Sales reps can qualify, analyze, and nurture leads using various strategies — for instance, they can use web forms to capture leads from landing pages, prioritize the ones most likely to close, then engage with them via email, phone, and more, tracking their activity along the way.
With this feature, sales reps can store and organize lead and customer data from different channels into a centralized location. Reps can also see a complete picture of a contact’s interactions, which helps them to meet the exact needs of their leads and prospects.
Sales automation tools help teams manage repetitive tasks that are essential to the sales process, such as sending follow-up emails, nurturing leads, and tracking opportunities. By setting up triggers or sequences, teams can automate manual tasks and focus more on increasing sales or refining sales strategies.
This feature helps sales teams predict future deals using historical data, current pipeline status, and external data sources. It enables teams to track individual sales progress and make informed decisions to improve sales strategies and meet their revenue goals.
To determine the best CRM software for salespeople needing to track their pipelines, we divided our scoring into six major categories, each of which included several weighted subcriteria. We then assigned scores for each subcriteria, which totaled an overall score out of five, and the sales pipeline software scoring the highest was identified as our winner. Finally, we determined a primary use case for each option that scored highly enough to make it onto our list.
The ability to view your sales pipeline will change the way you do business. It’s an important tool because it allows you to use data to determine how well your sales process is performing. And because a visual pipeline tracks sales activities, you can see which tasks are the most effective in getting a deal to close. Many CRMs include them as part of their suite of CRM features, but our list will help you find the one that will fit your needs and sales practices.
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