CRM for small businesses: only 29% use it, Cetic.br shows

Only 29% of Brazilian companies with 10 to 49 people employed used a CRM application to manage customer information in 2025, according to the TIC Empresas 2025 survey by Cetic.br/NIC.br, which interviewed 4,174 companies with ten or more people by phone between February 2025 and January 2026. It is the highest value in the series for small companies, and it sits close to the 23% the same question recorded in the 2011 edition. In fourteen years CRM moved to the cloud and gained free plans, and use among small companies rose six points, after falling to 16% in 2015. Among micro and small businesses, including sole entrepreneurs (MEI), Sebrae’s 2026 digital maturity survey found 41.8% of owners who say they have a customer management system that collects data at every contact, and the OECD heard from small businesses in twelve countries that the biggest digital barriers are maintenance costs (39%) and lack of time for training (38%). My reading is that in a small company the problem is rarely the tool: what is missing is time, method and someone responsible for turning customer records into a routine.

At Iasbeck&Co we implement CRM and AI agents in B2B operations and train the teams that use these tools, and part of the companies that come to me have between 10 and 50 people. The 2025 comparison by company size is in CRM market and in software market in Brazil. Here I look at the historical series for small companies, at what Sebrae measures among micro businesses and MEI, and at the barriers owners report.

How many small companies use CRM in Brazil?

In TIC Empresas, a small company has 10 to 49 people employed, and the question is whether it used “any CRM application to manage customer information” in the previous 12 months. In 2025, 29% of small companies answered yes, 66% no and 5% did not know. The edition’s report notes that the indicator was stable for a long time, even though the tool has been on the market for years, and attributes the 2025 growth to small companies, which went from 23% to 29%, and to the Southeast region (Cetic.br, 2026).

The series from 2011 to 2025

Cetic.br’s open tables carry the question in its current wording, with the breakdown by size, since 2011.

TIC Empresas edition	Small (10 to 49)	Medium (50 to 249)	Large (250 or more)	Total
2011	23%	31%	44%	27%
2015	16%	32%	41%	20%
2019	20%	32%	43%	22%
2021	25%	37%	48%	27%
2023	26%	36%	48%	28%
2024	23%	38%	50%	25%
2025	29%	41%	56%	31%

Sources: Cetic.br, table G3 of each edition: 2011, 2015, 2019, 2021, 2023, 2024 and 2025.

Use among small companies fell from 23% to 16% between 2011 and 2015, and the tables do not explain the drop, which I prefer to record without guessing a cause. Then it rose again to 29%, with a dip in 2024. The movement that matters most for anyone competing with larger companies is a different one: the gap between small and large companies went from 21 points in 2011 to 27 points in 2025. Large companies still use CRM at close to twice the rate of small ones, and the gap in points has grown.

Before 2011, Cetic.br asked whether the company “uses CRM applications to manage customer information”, and small companies said yes in 39% of cases in 2007 and 31% in 2010 (Cetic.br, 2007; Cetic.br, 2010). The sectors covered also changed in 2010, so those years stay out of the table. They serve as a warning: the answer to “do you use CRM?” changes with the wording of the question. There is also a change of base, because until 2021 the percentage was calculated over companies that used computers and, from 2023, over all companies, and differences of two or three points between neighboring years support no conclusion.

ERP moved further than CRM, in Brazil and in Europe

Eurostat runs the equivalent survey in the European Union, with the same cut of ten or more people and the same size bands.

Small companies (10 to 49 people)	CRM Brazil	CRM European Union	ERP Brazil	ERP European Union
2010 (EU) and 2011 (Brazil)	23%	23.44%	24%	17.47%
2015	16%	29.72%	21%	32.86%
2021	25%	31.16%	30%	32.41%
2023	26%	22.26% (new question)	29%	37.98%
2025	29%	24.69% (new question)	32%	41.08%

Sources: Cetic.br, tables G3 and G2 (ERP 2011, ERP 2025); Eurostat, dataset isoc_eb_iip, indicators E_CRM (until 2021), E_CRM1 (from 2023) and E_ERP1.

In 2023 Eurostat replaced the question about “software solutions like CRM” with a question about CRM software, which explains the drop from 31.16% to 22.26%. ERP among small European companies more than doubled since 2010, from 17.47% to 41.08%, while among small Brazilian companies it went from 24% to 32%. My hypothesis, which these surveys do not test, is that small companies digitize first what the accountant, the tax authority and cash flow demand, such as invoicing, inventory and finance, and leave the customer for later. Nobody fines a company for not recording the last conversation with a customer, and the cost shows up in the forgotten proposal and in the customer who disappears without anyone noticing.

How do small companies talk to customers today?

The same Cetic.br questionnaire shows small companies are where their customers are. The table brings together 2025 indicators of the digital front and the back office of companies with 10 to 49 people.

Small companies (10 to 49 people), 2025	Share	Base
Have their own social media profile	90%	With internet access
Sold online	69%	With internet access
Sold through WhatsApp, Skype or Facebook chat	81%	That sold online
Have a website	53%	With internet access
Used ERP	32%	Total
Used CRM	29%	Total
Have an IT or computing specialist	10%	Without an IT department

Sources: Cetic.br, tables B13A, E2B, E2C, B6, G2, G3 and F1A.

In selling, small companies outpace large ones, which sold online in 59% of cases and used messaging in 54% of those sales. The Cetic.br report describes a divide between small companies, which sell through direct contact with the customer, and larger ones, which use automated channels, and notes that the share of small companies with their own website has hovered around 50% since 2017 (Cetic.br, 2026). Multiplying the two shares, more than half of small companies with internet access sell through messaging apps, and fewer than a third have a CRM where that conversation could be recorded.

In many of the small companies I work with, the conversation happens on each salesperson’s phone, the quote goes out as a PDF in the same app and the history stays on the device of whoever handled it, and when that person leaves, the portfolio leaves too. The last row completes the picture: 68% of small companies have no IT department (Cetic.br, 2026) and 89% of those also have no specialist, which by my calculation means about six in ten small companies have nobody in technology in-house.

What about micro businesses and MEI? What Sebrae shows

TIC Empresas leaves out companies with fewer than ten people, which are most of the businesses in the country. For this group, the source is Sebrae, Brazil’s small business support agency, which classifies small businesses by revenue into sole entrepreneurs (MEI), micro companies (ME) and small companies (EPP). The 2026 Digital Maturity of Small Businesses survey, with a methodology by Sebrae and ABDI, interviewed 7,182 business owners by phone between July 20 and August 21, 2026, with a margin of error of 1.16% and weighting by state, size and sector (Sebrae, 2026). Respondents score 20 statements from 0 to 4, and two of them deal with recording and using customer data.

Statement (agree or strongly agree)	MEI	ME	EPP	Total
Has a customer management system and collects data at every contact	34.2%	50.1%	53.2%	41.8%
Runs periodic training to collect and use customer data	35.7%	47.4%	49.2%	41.2%
Uses software that manages all or almost all activities (2025)	30%	65%	78%	47%

Sources: Sebrae, report and tabulation by size of the 2026 Digital Maturity survey, sum of scores 3 and 4; last row from Digital Transformation in Small Businesses 2025.

Slightly more than half of EPP say they have a system that collects customer data at every contact, and among MEI the share drops to a third. In the same survey, only 33.3% agree that they use reports from their systems in decision meetings. The last row comes from the seventh edition of Digital Transformation in Small Businesses, also with 7,182 interviews, conducted between March and May 2025: the use of software that manages almost all activities was 27% in 2018, reached 50% in 2022 and has been at 47% since 2023. The 2026 edition did not repeat the indicator.

The 53.2% for EPP at Sebrae and the 29% for small companies at Cetic.br do not contradict each other: Sebrae asks for agreement with a broad statement that can fit a module of a sales system or a well-kept spreadsheet, and TIC Empresas asks about a CRM application. Read together, they say that half of small businesses believe they record the customer and fewer than a third of small companies have a tool built for it.

What holds back CRM in small companies: cost, knowledge or people?

The OECD’s 2026 D4SME survey heard from 2,018 small and medium-sized enterprises in twelve countries between late 2025 and early 2026, through an online questionnaire distributed by partner digital platforms, and 92% of the sample has up to 49 employees (OECD, 2026). Among the barriers to using digital tools, with up to three answers and an average across countries, companies named maintenance costs such as software subscriptions and technical services (39%), lack of time for training (38%), hardware costs (37%) and the cost of training (23%), and only 13% named regulatory complexity.

In Brazil, the closest recent question is about artificial intelligence. In the 2026 edition of Digital Transformation in Small Businesses, with 7,182 interviews between March and May, Sebrae asked businesses that do not plan to use AI in the following six months why not. Lack of knowledge about what AI does came first (38%), followed by “AI does not apply to the business” (32%), lack of data (31%) and lack of qualified labor (27%), and “too expensive” stood at 6% (Sebrae, 2026). The question is about AI, and I use it as an indication of the kind of barrier small business owners report when facing new technology. AI figures by company size are in AI in Brazilian companies.

For a small company, the problem is rarely the tool

Cost shows up in the sources in a specific form. In the OECD survey, what weighs is the subscription and upkeep, which repeat every month, and the time to learn, which comes out of the schedule of people who also sell, serve customers and collect payments. At Sebrae, lack of knowledge and data come far ahead of price, and at Cetic.br six in ten small companies have nobody in technology in-house. None of these barriers is solved by switching vendors, and all of them get worse when the company buys a system designed for a larger operation, with more fields and stages than the team can maintain.

In the small companies that use CRM well, I find a modest combination: a short, written sales process, few mandatory fields, one person responsible for the database and a weekly ritual in which the owner or manager reviews the portfolio inside the system. A small company fits in one room and changes habits in weeks. The 30-day plan to change that habit is in CRM adoption.

Summary of the surveys cited

Source	Year	Sample and method	Main finding
Cetic.br, TIC Empresas 2025	2026	4,174 companies with 10 or more people, phone, Feb 2025 to Jan 2026	29% of small companies used CRM and 32% used ERP
Cetic.br, TIC Empresas 2007 to 2024	2008 to 2025	Same population, phone; current wording since 2011	Small companies from 23% (2011) to 16% (2015) and 29% (2025); gap to large companies from 21 to 27 points
Eurostat, isoc_eb_iip	2010 to 2025	Official survey of EU companies with 10 or more people	CRM among small companies at 24.69% (2025); ERP from 17.47% to 41.08% since 2010
Sebrae/ABDI, Digital Maturity 2026	2026	7,182 MEI, ME and EPP, phone, 0 to 4 scale	41.8% say they have a customer management system; 53.2% of EPP and 34.2% of MEI
Sebrae, Digital Transformation 2025	2025	7,182 phone interviews	47% use software that manages almost all activities
Sebrae, Digital Transformation 2026	2026	7,182 phone interviews	Among those not planning to use AI, 38% cite lack of knowledge and 6% cite price
OECD, D4SME Survey 2026	2026	2,018 SMEs in 12 countries, online, non-representative sample	Maintenance costs (39%) and lack of time for training (38%) top the barriers

What these data do not say

All these surveys measure what respondents declare. A “yes” for CRM in TIC Empresas can be an operation where the team records every contact or a license only the owner opens now and then, and no source measures frequency of use, data quality or commercial results. TIC Empresas does not cover companies with fewer than ten people, and Sebrae does not cover medium-sized ones. Sebrae’s agreement scale tends to inflate answers about practices the owner sees as desirable, and its percentages should not be compared with Cetic.br’s as if they measured the same thing.

The comparison with Europe works as an order of magnitude, because Eurostat changed the question in 2023 and the questionnaires do not share the same wording. The OECD survey heard from companies that are already customers of digital platforms, with heavy weight from Japan (1,376 of the 2,018 responses, offset by averaging across countries), and the report warns that the results do not represent the small business population of any country. Finally, none of these sources shows that CRM makes a small company sell more: CRM users tend to be larger, and at Sebrae digital maturity rises with size and with the owner’s education, differences that are hard to separate from the effect of the system. What academic research knows about this is in Does CRM increase sales?.

What leadership does with these numbers

In a small company, sales leadership is usually the owner or a manager who also sells, and the plan below was written for that role.

1. Measure where the customer lives today. List the customers handled last week and count how many have a record in the system and how many exist only in some salesperson’s WhatsApp.
2. Write the process before configuring the system. Define the sales stages and the exit criterion for each one on a single page, with at most five mandatory fields. The questions that come before choosing a tool are in what CRM is and what it is for.
3. Name an owner for the database. With nobody in technology in the company, someone on the sales side needs to answer for fields, users and duplicates, with hours set aside each week.
4. Budget for upkeep and time, on top of the license. Put a year of subscription, the WhatsApp integration and the team’s training hours in the budget, the two barriers most cited by the OECD.
5. Move the weekly meeting into the CRM. When the owner runs the portfolio review on the system’s screen, the team understands that the record counts.
6. Compare yourself with your size and sector. An EPP should look at the EPP column at Sebrae, and a company with 10 to 49 people at its sector in Cetic.br, before concluding it is behind.

What HR and L&D take from these data

In a company with 10 to 50 people, HR is often the owner or someone wearing several hats, and CRM training is left to the vendor, in a two-hour session on where to click. The data point to a different need: 41.2% of small businesses agree that they run periodic training to collect and use customer data, according to Sebrae, and the OECD found lack of time for training in second place among barriers and fewer than 5% of companies with government-supported training in the three countries it detailed. At this size, what works is short training, done in the company’s own system, separated by role and repeated until it becomes a habit, with the before and after measured in the CRM itself.

Small Brazilian companies sell on WhatsApp, keep little of what happens in those conversations and have seen the gap to large companies grow over fourteen years. Closing that gap depends on routine, on someone responsible for the database and on a team that knows what to record and why, and that is the work of the in-company CRM adoption training, built on the company’s own process and system. It delivers a CRM best practices guide and a portfolio and database management manual, with the recording rules that take the customer off the salesperson’s phone and into a history the company controls.

Frequently asked questions

How many small companies use CRM in Brazil?

According to Cetic.br’s TIC Empresas 2025, 29% of Brazilian companies with 10 to 49 people employed used a CRM application in the previous 12 months. Among large companies, with 250 people or more, the share was 56%.

Is CRM use growing among small companies?

It grew little in fourteen years: it was 23% in 2011, fell to 16% in 2015 and rose again to 29% in 2025, the highest value in the series. Over the same period, the gap to large companies widened from 21 to 27 percentage points.

Does a small company need CRM if it already serves customers on WhatsApp?

WhatsApp handles the conversation, and CRM keeps the history, the next step and each salesperson’s portfolio. Among small companies that sell online, 81% use messaging apps, and fewer than a third of small companies have CRM, which leaves the portfolio dependent on the phone of whoever handled the customer. Connecting the two is usually the first thing to solve.

Why don’t small companies use CRM?

The most cited barriers are maintenance costs and lack of time for training, according to the OECD, and lack of knowledge and of qualified people, according to Sebrae, in a question about AI. In Brazil, about six in ten small companies have neither an IT department nor an IT specialist, which leaves implementation to the owner or an outside vendor.

Is Brazil behind Europe in CRM among small companies?

In CRM, no: 29% of small Brazilian companies used CRM in 2025, against 24.69% of European ones, with similar but not identical questions. The gap is in ERP, which small European companies more than doubled since 2010 and which reaches 41.08% of them, against 32% in Brazil.

How do you prepare a small company’s team to use CRM?

Start with a written process and few mandatory fields, name someone responsible for the database and train each role in the company’s own system, covering what to record after each customer conversation. Then run the weekly portfolio meeting inside the CRM and measure the share of active customers with a recorded next step before and after the training.