How to find the right balance between cost and features.

Having a CRM to manage your business and customers is ideal, but it needs to fit within your budget and have the features you need to be effective and efficient.  If you’re researching CRMs, I have some suggestions and steps to follow.

Before moving forward think of your business workflow – how you onboard and interact with clients or customers, what products or services you offer now and what you plan to offer in the future, what falls through the cracks and how you categorize information.

1. Do you need to alert staff or automatically assign tasks to staff based on information input into the system or at certain stages of the sales process?
2. What are features you need now and will need in the future?
3. Are there unique aspects of your business that you want to build into the system or can you work with a CRM’s standard fields?

I touch on workflow in a previous post

Consider the plan offerings for various CRMs and how quickly the cost increases from the most basic plan to the most comprehensive. Does the cost per user increase incrementally and top out at a reasonable price or does the cost increase exponentially where moving up to the next plan level is out of your budget? The key is to think about what features you will eventually need. If those features are in the costliest plan for a CRM then disregard it.  You don’t want to start with one CRM and have to migrate to another as that plan ultimately goes over your budget.

Many CRMs have free versions. Those free versions are often standardized and don’t allow for much if any customization.  Salesforce’s free Essentials plan is one of them.  The next plan level costs $75/user/month, and it’s best to talk to an account rep to get the best price.

There are three other systems I recommend for small businesses:  Zoho, Hubspot and Quick Base.  Each have great features, and Zoho and Hubspot have free versions that allow for some customization and a next level plan that isn’t too expensive.

For businesses with 20 or more users, Quick Base, a low code database builder, is a useful tool. You can build exactly what you want from scratch and can modify and add on to your database easily as you grow.

Reach out to me. I will work with you to find the best CRM and help you configure it to suit your business needs.