As a small business owner, what are the top things I should consider before purchasing a CRM?

Hi Sandra,

I think you can start with good contact management and calendar management. These are the point of contacts with your customers. From there you need to have good sales automation/management tools. You should also consider how easy to use the CRM for your users. Other things such as cost should also be part of your consideration. Hosted CRM is more cost effective.

You can have a look at http://www.borneosoft.com. It has automatic quotation generation and fast search for contacts. It also has blogs that your users can use.

Sandra; avoiding unnecessary limitations is key.

Any small business can take up a ton of different business management software to help manage their business, but this often results in high monthly costs as well as a lack of integration capabilities. When you lack integration, you lack efficiency, and in all honesty even with a cut off of efficiency like that from integration, you lose too much time to make it worthwhile.

What I'd say to consider is what specifically your business needs and what it does. If you are in need of managing customers, it's likely you sell a product or service, and therefore need to manage tasks/invoices as well. If you're eventually going to have to get these applications anyways, why not combine them into one to avoid integration issues? Having all in one applications that combine all of these aspects will help create an amazing workflow while costing you a heck of a lot less.

Hopefully that helped!

David

There are a number of CRM products and contact managers on the market at varying prices. You did not describe your type of business which limits the kind of answers you will get to this question.

I use ACT by Sage as my contact manager, an inexpensive but full featured product. The new version 11 integrates to Outlook for email and contact transfer to your mobile phone. I don't believe that ACT integrates to enterprise systems, which your small business may not need anyway. One thing I like alot about ACT is that it is still a desktop application, which means you can use it when not connected to the Internet. It is not essential to have Internet access at all times for a contact manager, although it certainly can be helpful.

Things to worry about increase if you have a lot of customers or contacts. Being able to sort them in various categories and download the contacts to spreadsheets makes it easier to manage mailings to them and otherwise analyze them. The most important thing I find is the ability to create dated notes and copy emails into the contact manager, for easy reference later in the sales process.

In a pinch, Outlook can be used as a contact manager but lacks some of the sorting capability. You can retain notes in Outlook.

SalesForce.com is the gold standard of on-line systems and should be considered.

I think that the top thing you need to consider before introducing CRM to your business is user adoption. Do you have a need to track customers, marketing and support efforts more than you are right now? CRM can be a lot like buying a treadmill before you start running. You purchase the treadmill with the intent of getting in shape because you think it will get you motivated to look at it every day then in a week or two its and over priced clothes hanger. Same thing happens with CRM unless your already in the habit of recording ever single customer interaction, you may end up with an overpriced Rolodex. Good habits are hard to start and bad ones are hard to break and CRM to be used productively really needs to be a habit.

Work out what you want it to do. Go from there.

And factor in scalability - and (crucially) ease of use - by which I mean how easy is it to customise / develop, and how user-friendly is it for non-tech users to use. Then, the ease with which meaningful and useful data can be extracted.

This includes integrating it with as many of the other ICT systems you have in place - otherwise there is an enormous waste of time incurred with double-entry - which won't encourage people to use it.

The hardware / software interfaces are important too - having had one critical project die a death becasue nobody had thought to check whether there was sufficient server capacity to run the upgraded programme bought before I came on the scene, I know only too well the importance of that!

If you're the decision maker, then this won't be relevant, but if you're depending on others to make the final decisions, try and make sure they have at least some understanding of ALL the issues - and haven't just got their heads stuck firmly in the sand having been the people who spent a ton of money, without thinking things through and involving other relevant people (like the ICT manager?), and are therefore unwilling to accept they got it wrong.

On that note though, I council caution when the ICT manager steps in and starts proposing solutions - unless of course you have confidence in the recommendations. This is a business issue, not an ICT driven one.

And finally - make sure you're committed to spending the time to get the thing up and running. Which includes training users, and formulating policies and procedures to make sure they input data. Which brings us back to ease of use - -

Without these, it won't get used!

(I'm very interested in the solutions proposed - notably with regard to "off the shelf" packages and specific software suggestions.)

Did I mention "ease of use"?

Mike

The main considerations for a small business is the same as that for a large business:

How can you find a system that will support the business processes that you need, both now and in the future?

How can you ensure that the implementation/maintenance costs are reasonable? (Over the life of the system, the maintenance costs typically exceed the implementation costs by a factor of two or more).

How can you guarantee a successful implementation?

The following white paper describes a process by which you can achieve these goals:
http://www.focus.com/ugr/research/crm/how-pick-right-crm-helpdesk-bpm-vendor/