Which CRM should a small business choose?
The one your team will actually keep clean, sized to how you sell and priced for the features you will use rather than the deck the salesperson showed. For most small Australian businesses that means starting smaller than you think and integrating properly, not buying big and abandoning it.
The longer answer
In practice.
The question before the product
How do you actually sell: long relationships or quick quotes, one closer or a
team, phone or inbox? A CRM is a mirror of your sales motion; choosing one before
describing the motion is how businesses end up paying for pipeline theatre nobody
updates.
The honest field
HubSpot's free tier is a legitimate start and scales expensively. Zoho is
underrated value for small teams. Salesforce is superb and usually overkill under
twenty seats. Job-system CRMs (the one built into your industry tool)
are often enough. I have built inside HubSpot, Salesforce and Zoho, and none pays me commission.
What matters more than the pick
Adoption and plumbing: the CRM fed automatically from your website, inbox and
billing so it stays true without discipline, per
CRM & automation. A modest CRM kept accurate
beats a famous one kept theoretical.