CRM – What it should mean to you and the questions to ask yourself

A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is a vital tool that every business should have if they either sell products or services, or have heavy client interactions. A CRM will bring order out of chaos with the sheer volume of data businesses keep, either about their transactions, their clients, and more normally both (as well as the entire sales journey).

Once you have identified the key benefits of a CRM, how do you go about choosing the best fit for you? While there is a lot of information available, a lot of it is confusing if you have little underlying technical experience, so we have put together some important questions that need to be asked.

1.)   What are you looking for in a CRM to support your business?

2.)   How much data are you looking to capture and what are the different categories?

3.)   Are you a start-up business?

4.)   Are you in a niche market?

5.)   Do you already capture any data from your website or app?

Each have specific reasons for these questions to ensure that you are receiving the right advice from your consultant of choice.

There are a lot of commercial CRMs available now, each shouting about how great they are and touting long lists of features and functionalities. But before jumping on board with the biggest providers, stop for a minute and ask yourself if you are running before you can walk? Are these systems suitable for a small business? What you will find with market leaders such as Salesforce, Hubspot and Microsoft Dynamics is that they are VERY powerful solutions. There is a vast amount of functionality there that you are probably never going to use. Sure, you’ll review the reports but will you be looking at the social feeds every day – maybe not!

Pitted against the commercial CRMs are the custom-built systems. These can be built from the ground up for you, and contain everything you do need and nothing that you don’t. They can of course be upgraded but the message here is – fit for purpose. These systems do not carry extra that you will not need. They have been designed to fit your business and more crucially SET UP for your business. This means the data flows are logical for you, the outcomes mean something and you will be able to see the value that the system drives.

The alternative to the commercial CRMs and Custom Built ones are the niche players. Gartner (the IT industry consultants) provide a great visual tool of their assessment of the industry (https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3985947/magic-quadrant-for-the-crm-customer-engagement-center). This is well worth a review if you have access as it shows the position the various competitors and different types of CRM we have discussed here, which fit into the overall market space.

Ask yourself the key questions and see if you REALLY need all the bells and whistles that are offered by Salesforce, Hubspot or Dynamics? If not then why pay extra for what you may not use? You wouldn’t do that when buying a spreadsheet application so why do it on a much larger scale with your CRM?

It all comes down to knowing what you need and how that should be set up in the first place. Speaking to the right consultants is going to save a lot of time, money and effort. They can guide you with your appraisal of various commercial CRMs, and advise on what modules might be the best fit for you. They can also summarise the benefits of custom-built systems and how, in the long run, they can be a better fit, both commercially and with the features and functionality on offer.

 If you would like to know more please contact me for a confidential discussion.