The CRM You Pick Today Will Either Grow With You or Make Your Life a Misery…
Choosing a CRM rarely feels like a big decision at the time. Something does what’s needed right now, the price looks reasonable, and the team’s keen to stop working out of a makeshift shared drive. Fast forward a year, though, and you’ll be well acquainted with the limits and nuances of the one you picked. Either it’s become the backbone everything else runs on, or it’s turned into the system no one actually uses.
The difference usually isn’t the CRM itself. It’s whether anyone thought about what the business might need next, rather than just what it needs today.
Chosen for where you are, not where you’re going
It’s an easy trap to fall into. It’s hard to shop for a problem you don’t have yet. A ten-person sales team doesn’t need enterprise-grade permissions, so a lean, affordable CRM feels like the sensible choice, right up until the business doubles in size or sales, service and finance all need to start working from the same information.
“We’ve spent over twenty years implementing CRM systems for clients,” says Vivek, Caldere’s Marketing Director. “Almost every time something goes wrong further down the line, the software gets blamed first. But almost every time we dig into it, the software’s only part of the story. Usually it’s the decision made right at the start, about what the business would actually need in a few years.”
The signs a CRM won’t grow with you
A few things tend to show up early. If adding one custom field means raising a support ticket and waiting a fortnight, that’s a pretty good indication of how easy the system will be to change later. If it won’t connect properly with the finance or marketing platforms, you’re likely to end up with important information spread across different systems instead of everyone working from the same picture.
Pricing can be another warning sign. Some platforms look affordable at ten users and become eye-wateringly expensive at fifty, not because you’ve suddenly started getting five times as much from the software, but because the licensing model gets harder to swallow as the business grows.
What “growing with you” actually looks like
The CRM that grows with a business doesn’t necessarily need to be the one with the longest feature list. It needs to be flexible enough to accommodate how the business actually works, and how that might change over time.
That’s one of the reasons platforms like Zoho can work well for growing businesses. It doesn’t ask every business to work in exactly the same way. Custom modules, workflows and integrations give you room to build around your processes, rather than constantly changing those processes to suit the software.
Getting it right the first time
This isn’t about trying to predict every twist and turn of the next three years. Most businesses couldn’t do that if they tried. But it is worth picturing the business at roughly twice its current size and asking whether the system in front of you would still make sense.
If the honest answer is “we’d probably have to replace the whole thing”, that’s useful information to have before you’ve spent eighteen months building your data, processes and team’s habits around it.
If you’re choosing a CRM for the first time, or wondering whether the one you’ve got is slowly becoming the thing holding you back, speak to the Caldere team.