Which CRM should you choose? Advice that will save you hundreds of euros

A CRM is a complex and expensive tool for managing sales. The effectiveness of the sales department, and of the company as a whole, depends on which CRM you bring in. Setting one up and using it costs from 10 USD a month for a freelancer to hundreds of dollars a month for a large company. And you certainly want that investment to pay for itself. So read on and use our recommendations. 

Why do you need a CRM when there are spreadsheets and a notebook? 

A CRM helps manage every aspect of working with a customer: from arranging meetings and signing a contract to encouraging repeat sales and remembering birthdays. 

Companies that have brought in a CRM get more information about their customers. 

What happens if you choose the wrong CRM?  

Which problems arise from a mistake in choosing a CRM? Let us look at several typical scenarios: 

• After the CRM is brought in, salespeople spend too much time working in it. In time your staff will stop filling in most of the information — otherwise they will not meet the monthly sales plan. 

• After data is imported into the CRM from various sources, chaos sets in. Customers end up with two or three records each. The same can happen to deals. 

• Salespeople work out in the field a great deal. If such a company brings in a CRM with no mobile version, there will certainly be trouble. Staff will simply not have time to record significant actions, the information will lag behind the real situation, and the money invested in the CRM will not pay for itself. 

Many entrepreneurs recognise these risks and prefer to keep track of customers in a notebook or a spreadsheet. But avoiding the risks means avoiding the benefit too. So let us work out how to find a suitable CRM. 

Choosing a CRM, stage by stage 

Let us split choosing a CRM into four stages. They may take a long time, and that is normal — you are making a serious decision.

Decide which tasks the CRM has to solve first of all   

A CRM has to be chosen and configured with the particular business's problems in mind. Say your account managers spend a long time drawing up contracts and letters and make a great many mistakes in the documents. In that situation you need a CRM that automates work with documents. It should have: 

• a document builder that composes letters and contracts in one click from previously saved templates. The system simply fills in the variables from the customer and deal records; 

• integration with email, to send the customer documents composed inside the CRM at once. 

If staff spend time on call reports, look for a CRM that integrates with IP telephony. 

Narrowing the search 

You have analysed the business's needs and decided which CRM functions matter to you. What next? The second stage is to settle on the type of CRM you need. 

• Cloud CRMs. Such services keep all the data on the developer's servers, and a browser is all you need to reach the interface. These solutions are optimal for small businesses: they need no extra hardware, and the developer maintains the system. All that is asked of users is to configure the CRM for themselves and pay for it regularly. 

• Desktop CRMs. These are installed on an internal server or a VDS. In such cases you need a specialist's help to deploy and maintain the service and the CRM. You pay for such systems only when you buy them. 

• Bespoke CRMs. The most expensive option. Such programs are built from scratch specifically for your company. Investing in a bespoke CRM is justified only for a large business, and such a project costs from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

• Packaged CRMs. Solutions with a standard set of functions, the most affordable of all. 

CRMs can be universal or industry-specific. Systems in the second category are built for the particulars of a given field — tourism, online education or manufacturing, for instance. 

Pick several CRMs and test them against your criteria 

Choose several CRMs to test and settle on the criteria for judging them. Which parameters do you choose a CRM by? 

• Functionality. Configure the CRM and make sure it has every function it claims, and every capability that matters to your business. 

• A convenient interface. Many projects to bring a CRM in fail because account managers find it awkward to work in. To judge a system, create and fill in a customer record, a contact and a deal. Be sure to set an account manager a test task. If you have mastered every function in a day or two, the CRM has passed the interface test. 

• Flexibility and a variety of settings. Look into the custom fields. How many new sections can be created in each customer record? Can functionality you do not need be switched off? The more freedom a CRM gives, the better. 

• Integrations. Quick integration with accounting software, mail services, your site's CMS and messengers is a serious advantage. That turns the CRM into a control centre for business processes. 

• Access to reports and statistics. Check whether the system has analytics and the option of exporting reports. That is one of a CRM's basic functions, and how convenient the reports are affects your business's productivity. 

• Access rights settings. Not all data should be shown to ordinary staff. Look for a CRM with different levels of access to information.  

The final stage: questions for the CRM's makers

Having picked two or three options, prepare to talk to representatives of the developers. To make the final decision you need answers to several important questions: 

• On what terms is technical support provided? Which channels reach the specialists? 

• Does the company take orders for extending the functionality? If so, what does that cost? 

• Can the company deploy and configure the CRM end to end? 

• Are updates to the system's functionality paid? 

• What is the minimum period a CRM has to be paid for (for cloud solutions)? 

• Are there discounts for paying for a long period? Are there other bonuses for clients? 

Having gathered the answers from every candidate, analyse the information and make your decision. 

Conclusions 

Choosing, configuring and bringing in a CRM can stretch over several weeks. That is a serious length of time, but it is better to wait than to spend several hundred or even several thousand dollars ineffectively. 

Remember that a CRM is only a tool. In most cases the system helps strong salespeople, while weak ones carry on at the same level. 

For your own business you can use the open source SuiteCRM from the Business Box package.