Small business CRM: How to select the right CRM software for your company

You've decided that you need a better customer relationship management system ("CRM") for your small business. You need a good place to store and access your customer information just like bigger companies. You want to be able to generate meaningful reports and manage your marketing campaigns. But there are so many options in all price ranges.

So how do you choose the best CRM software for your company?

What is CRM, exactly?

In its simplest form, CRM is a database where sales and marketing teams store critical account data such as contact & account information, lead source, sales activity history, purchase history, and marketing campaign data and projections.

CRM can also be an important reporting tool. For example, you can use it to

• Generate revenue projections for a product, a sales rep, and your company as a whole
• Tie revenue to the original marketing campaign
• Pull up lists of leads and activities by sales rep
• View the number of leads you have at each step in your sales process
• Track your progress against your goals
• Manage marketing campaigns
• Capture leads from your website
• Minimize the time your team spends creating manual sales & activity reports

Choosing the right CRM

When you choose the right CRM software, you gain knowledge and power to keep your team on track and measure progress against goals.

• Best case: Your CRM matches your marketing, sales, customer service and retention strategies. It's easy to use and provides reports that eliminate the need to generate tedious manual reports. It may integrate with other software like accounting and inventory, enabling your entire team to view important data and reports in real time.
• Worst case: You don't have a solid system for managing customer information; it's kept in various files or databases that aren't linked. It's difficult and time-consuming to create revenue projections, sales reports and marketing campaign reports. The result: lost revenue, productivity and opportunity. Even worse: you use paper files.

How to compare CRM software

The key to selecting the right CRM is to analyze your needs.

• Decide what information your team should be able to access and how they'll use it.
• Identify who needs to use the system and where they're located (i.e. in different offices).
• Determine what reports you'll want to generate, particularly your revenue and pipeline reports.
• Identify the marketing programs you'd like to be able to run and how that information can help you better manage your accounts.

If you've outgrown your current system, you may be able to purchase add-ins to give your existing system more power. You may also decide to evaluate new systems to give you the true functionality you need.

Select a CRM vendor

Once you've defined your requirements, look for a CRM package that meets your needs. Remember that many systems come in several versions; you can start with a basic version and upgrade as you grow, but make sure the upgrade process is seamless.

Manage CRM implementation

When you're nearing the end of your selection process, get ready for implementation.

• Create an implementation team.
• Develop a schedule for key tasks: configuring fields, migrating data, creating reports, training users.
• Create a solid training plan.
• Launch the software.
• Do followup training to ensure that your team uses the software as planned. Most implementations fail because employees don't use the software properly.
• Gather feedback and modify the software configuration as needed; make it as intuitive and powerful as possible.

There are plenty of consultants who can help you through this process. But you can save a lot of time and money by educating yourself. We've created a free CRM selector tool to help you define your needs and narrow your vendor list -- just email us now and we'll send it to you.

James Sagar is one of the creators of the Marketing M.O., web-based software that delivers marketing strategy, guided best practices and interactive templates in 29 business marketing subjects. Entrepreneurs, executives and marketers use the M.O. to solve the challenges they face each day.

How To Define Your Needs Before Buying Crm

Like many other business trends, the pressure to keep up with the latest technology developments and hold on to your competitive edge can often lead to rushed and poorly researched decisions. Such is the case with Customer Relationship Management and its enormous industry growth and migration rates. Many CEO?s have been left scratching their head, wondering how to keep up and which CRM product is right for them?

The CRM market is packed with solutions that range from the simple contact management and tracking to the feature rich comprehensive solutions that can reach across you entire organization. However, the question for the interested buyer should remain, ?What can our organization/company/employees do with this CRM?? and not ?What can this CRM do for my company?? Approaching CRM vendors with this mindset will allow you to see past the over kill features and cumbersome processes inherent in most solutions. You need to see the value of their product as it relates to your business specific needs. Refining your company needs for a CRM solution based on your current business practices will help you find a suitable CRM solution!

By really analyzing your current processes and methods, flagging the procedures you want to enhance or areas you want to improve in efficiency, will better prepare you to test out CRM vendor platforms. As well as help you model your business processes to better benefit from a suitable CRM solution.

The majority of CRM software solutions are built on best practices in business, flowing from Marketing and Lead Management to Sales Automation; Account, Contact and Opportunity management to Sales tracking, reporting and forecasting capabilities. Furthermore, CRM vendors also offer simple customer service, support, and tracking features in the form of Case and Solution management. This base model is prevalent in many industry solutions and makes the first step on to a CRM platform relatively smooth.

However, the customer is left to do the drilling or the ?kicking of the tires? if you will, to really substantiate the value of the features embedded in the program and see if they will improve their current business processes, as well as enhance their employee productivity. In this case, finding the functions you need in a CRM will be just as important as the form it comes in. Acquiring a user friendly product will ensure your employees adopt the product quickly and continue to use it in the long run.

With step one accomplished, the goal should now be to review the extent of the product offered by the vendor. Can this CRM solution accommodate your growing company? Your need to manage key processes such as projects, billing and invoicing, contracts, quote management, product inventory, human resource management, etc. should all be met by the same CRM solution. There is nothing more disconcerting then having to procure services from multiple vendors to get close to the CRM functionality and organization you need.

By defining your needs in a CRM software solution, you will be better served when it comes to researching and evaluating the different products on the market, as well ensuring your company benefits from your decision on the whole. By knowing what you it is you need in a CRM, as well as what it is that will work for your particular organization, you will ensure your employees can adopt and use the solution you choose.

Colin Duffy enjoys writing about CRM subjects and on demand CRM and ERP software vendors such as Salesboom ( http://www.salesboom.com )

How To Calculate CRM Total Cost Of Ownership (TCO)

Although it may look and sound complicated, calculating the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for on demand CRM is as simple as elementary subtraction. Or to go one step further, more money will be going into your business rather than the system that struggles to support it. The on demand model affords customers greater flexibility in accessibility and product, hassle free hosting of information, upgrades year round and greater security of information, just to name a few perks!

For those not using on demand CRM allow me to break down its cost effectiveness versus out of the box or custom built solutions:

For starters you can take your current IT costs and subtract all your hours and dollars spent on system maintenance, upgrades, integration and up keep.

Now further subtract the cost incurred for hosting your current network or CRM application. If it is in house then you can deduce server costs, power costs etc... If you host via third party you can go ahead and drop that cost all together.

So things are starting to look a little brighter!

For those who currently use an out of the box CRM system, you can go ahead and knock off the costs incurred for support, training, customization and yearly upgrades, and every other hidden fee you incur.

I am sure that by now some of you are probably feeling a little skeptical; and I don?t blame you, the potential to save this much money definitely warrants some initial second guessing. But don?t let me convince you, see for yourself and put your worries to rest once and for all.

No upfront costs ? with on demand CRM, the software is already built and it is entirely hosted online, all you have to do is subscribe and start using it.

No downloads ? the on demand CRM platform ensures you are never burdened by continual downloads cluttering up your computer and network while slowly eating up your memory.

No hosting fees ? the on demand platform is designed, built and maintained by an expert IT staff, hosted at an external secure location with manned security personnel. Enabling you the user to focus solely on your business and only your business.

Customizable platform ? the on demand SaaS platform is readily customizable by expert developers and product engineers. No longer will you have to fork over thousands of dollars to mash stand alone legacy systems into a tedious and often bug ridden enterprise solution.

Free upgrades ? with the flexibility of the on demand CRM model, top CRM vendors can offer continual and seamless updates and enhancements to their solution.

Security of Information ? a common misconception with the on demand platform is the issue of information security. While many find comfort in having their information hosted on site, they are in fact more vulnerable to intruders or hackers, or disgruntled employees then they would be by using the ASP/on demand platform. A good CRM vendor out sources the hosting of their servers to ISP providers, thus guaranteeing greater security and up time for their customers.

There is no denying the aforementioned facts, on demand CRM offers you greater bang for your buck when compared to the conventional out of the box offerings. On demand CRM removes the headaches of IT maintenance along with its hefty costs, it optimizes your employee work rate and in turn, allows you to bring in more money while spending less. Not to mention your company info could not be more secure!

Colin Duffy enjoys writing about CRM subjects and on demand CRM and ERP software vendors such as Salesboom ( http://www.salesboom.com )