5 Questions to Ask Before Choosing a CRM Provider
You have finally reached the point where you know you need a CRM system to keep track of your business contacts, projects, and tasks. Now comes the hard part, figuring out which CRM system is the best fit for your business.
To help you narrow down your options and focus on what your business really needs, here are five questions to ask.
1. How Many Employees Are Going to Use the System?
One of the first questions to figure out is how many of your employees are going to use the system. This is important for several reasons:
- Number of Users Directly Influences Price-The more users you have, the more it is going to cost. So figuring out your number of users first will help you when it comes time to pricing out options.
- Number of Users Influences What User Management Features You Need-If you have a lot of users, then you are probably going to want advanced features to manage them. For example, access privilege settings, which let you make content accessible to only certain users; or territory management, which lets you divide salespeople into multiple teams with separate leads and contacts.
If you are going to have a lot of users or multiple sales’ teams, you are probably going to want the advanced management features offered by providers such as Zoho, Salesforce, or SugarCRM (paid versions only). If you are going to have 10 or fewer users, and permissions are not so crucial, a more basic system such as Insightly or Nimble should be more than adequate for your needs.
2. What Is My Budget?
If you happen to have a super fat CRM budget, then it is probably best to figure out what features you need and narrow price down that way. But most small businesses do not have that luxury and will have to find a CRM that best fits their needs within a specific budget.
In general, the more features you need, the higher the cost. Here is the cost per user for a variety of popular CRM systems:
- Bitrix24 = Free for up to 12 users
- Insightly = $15/user/month (Free for up to 2 users)
- Nimble = $15/user/month
- Zoho CRM = $35/user/month (Enterprise Edition)
- SugarCRM = $65/user/month (Enterprise Edition)
- Salesforce = $125/user/month (Enterprise Edition)
- Hatchbuck = $300/month for unlimited users
If you have a specific budget, take that number and divide it by your number of anticipated users. This will give you a ballpark price-per-user figure that you can cross reference with the list above to narrow down which CRMs you can actually afford.
For more help comparing different CRM providers, check out Fit Small Business’s guide to the Best CRM Providers.
3. What Do I Want to Use My CRM for?
You should identify what you want your CRM to do early in the buying process. This will help you narrow down your options much quicker as you go along and keep you from getting starstruck by features you do not really need. When people think CRM, they think contact and sales management. If you just need the basics, Insightly and Nimble are perfect, because they do the basics well without a lot of extra confusing features.
But CRMs can also do a lot more. And for some businesses, tapping into some of the extra marketing and customer service features that high-powered CRMs like Zoho, Sugar, and Salesforce offer can be a real lifesaver. You can automatically import customer service tickets from a form on your website, import leads from web forms, and even directly import prospective contacts to email campaigns.
Identify your primary focus area(s) and see which systems are set up best to meet your needs.
4. Which Other Systems Do I Need My CRM to Be Compatible With?
Wanting to import sales numbers directly into your accounting software or send email addresses right to your email marketing app? If so, you better check and make sure that the CRM system you are looking at can work with your current systems. This is what you should do:
- Make a list of the integrations that are absolutely necessary for your business.
- Call the CRM providers you are considering and see how many programs/apps on your list they already integrate with.
- Once you have narrowed your list down to one or two providers, do some user review research and find out what actual customers have to say about the integrations.
Once you have done the research, you should have a pretty good idea of which system will be the best fit for your business.
5. What Additional Features Do I Need?
Most CRMs do contact and sales management. But, many also offer a variety of additional features that may be benefit to your business.
For example, maybe you run an online marketing business and need to monitor social media to see what chatter there is about your business and to keep track of your clients. If so, Nimble and Zoho have you covered. Zoho is also a complete office product suite, offering accounting, website visitor tracking, help desk software, and much more that all work together (for an additional price, of course).
Or maybe you are a small company that juggles doing building/property inspections along with a lot of different projects. If so, then you should really check out Insightly, which has some killer project management software included in its CRM package.
The point here is identify what additional features might be helpful for your business, and then compare them to the additional features offered by the CRMs you are considering to find the best fit.
Let’s Sum Up
Once you have asked these five questions, it should be clear who your top two to three candidates are. At this point, the best thing to do is to try the system out for yourself. Most CRM systems offer a free trial period, which is the best way tell if a system will really work for your business. Try your options out, see which is intuitive to use and best meets your needs, and make your decision.
