Choosing a CRM for an SME: 8 questions to ask

A CRM (customer relationship management tool) brings your leads, customers, conversations and quotes together in one place. It replaces shared spreadsheets, sticky notes and follow-ups jotted in personal calendars.

Chosen well, it saves the whole sales team time. Chosen badly, it is abandoned after three months and the spreadsheets come back. Here are eight questions to ask before you choose.

Question 1: what do you expect from the CRM?

Start from the problems you want to solve, not from a list of features. Forgotten follow-ups? Quotes nobody can track? Contacts scattered across everyone’s inbox? No overview of the month’s sales?

Rank these problems by importance. They will be your yardstick for every option: a CRM that solves your top three problems beats a tool that does everything except what matters.

Question 2: who will use it, and on which device?

Count the users today and in three years: salespeople, management, assistants, technicians. Not everyone needs the same access: a salesperson sees their own leads, management sees everything.

Also ask where they will use it. Salespeople on the road need simple access on their phone, including to log a meeting as they leave a customer.

Question 3: how does your sales process work?

Describe your sales cycle step by step: first contact, meeting, quote, follow-up, signature. These steps become the columns of the pipeline, the view that shows where each deal stands.

A CRM should follow the way you sell. If you have to change your method to fit the tool, it is the wrong tool, or it will need adapting.

Question 4: which data needs importing?

Your contacts are surely somewhere already: Excel files, an old application, address books, inboxes. Before importing, clean up: duplicates, outdated contacts, columns filled in differently by different people.

Check that the CRM can import this data and, above all, export it one day if you switch tools.

Question 5: which tools must it exchange data with?

An isolated CRM means typing things twice. List the tools that must send it or receive information: your website contact form, email, calendar, quoting and invoicing software, accounting, ERP.

For each one, check that the connection exists and what it costs. When a connection is missing, an automation can often move the data between the two tools.

Question 6: what does the GDPR say about your lead files?

A CRM holds personal data: names, emails, phone numbers. The GDPR applies, even in B2B. A few rules to plan for when choosing the tool:

• Inform people that you are recording their data, and let them object to marketing.
• Limit how long you keep data: the CNIL, France’s data protection authority, recommends not keeping a lead’s data for more than three years after their last contact with you.
• Manage access rights: each user only sees the data they need.
• Know where the data is hosted: hosting within the European Union makes GDPR compliance simpler.

Question 7: what will it cost over three years?

Compare over three years, not the first month. For an off-the-shelf CRM: subscription per user per month, paid add-ons, connectors, setup time. For a custom CRM: design, data import, hosting and, if you choose it, maintenance.

Subscriptions often suit a small team with a standard sales process. Custom software makes sense as the number of users grows or when your way of selling is unusual. Our guide on custom vs off-the-shelf software goes through this calculation.

Question 8: how will the team adopt it?

A CRM is useless if nobody fills it in. Adoption needs preparing:

• Involve one or two future users in the choice.
• Keep mandatory fields to a minimum: every extra field is a reason not to fill in the record.
• Plan a short training session on your own data.
• Make the CRM the single source: the figures shown in meetings come from it.

Common mistakes

• Choosing on a demo without testing with your real data and real users.
• Configuring everything at once: start with the pipeline and follow-ups, add the rest later.
• Importing a file without cleaning it: the spreadsheet’s duplicates become the CRM’s duplicates.
• Forgetting the exit: without a planned export, your data stays locked in the tool.

How to decide, in practice

1. List your three to five top sales problems.
2. Map your sales cycle, step by step.
3. Count users today and in three years.
4. List the tools to connect and the files to import.
5. Compare two or three options on these criteria and on the three-year cost.
6. Test with your real data before signing.

Torn between an off-the-shelf CRM and a custom CRM? Tell us how you sell: we will tell you what would suit you best.