When do you know that it’s time to build or acquire a CRM?
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I think the decision to use a CRM is a critical partnership between sales practices, customer relationships and IT. Additionally, I do not believe this is an IT decision solely. I feel a CRM is needed when the ability to effectively and efficiently manage customer data without it, is no longer possible.
As a side-note, I'd suggest that if you are considering a CRM it may be time to consider an ERP. In my experience, an ERP may include some or all of the CRM functionality you are looking for.
I have found value in free or inexpensive CRM tools in companies 5 people or less. Being intentional about managing your customer relationships is really important regardless of company size. And there is so much complexity in sales process that I would not want to manage it in a spreadsheet, even as a solopreneur. But another way to look at the question might be, when is the right time to begin to put rigor into your sales process? There I think the more sales people you have, the more important a good sales process is. If you have 3 or more sales people, you should have a clear process that you follow for sales and a pipeline that can be shared with the leaders of the company.
I guess an IT department should propose it since the beginning. In my view it should be available when the project starts.
I think that deploying a CRM within an organization could be a huge challenge depending on many factors such as: the size of the organization, the business objectives, the integration to be done.
We built basic CRM functions inside our applications (reminders, alerts, comments, follow-ups). Then, it became obvious that we won't develop a complete CRM on our own.
We first picked one. A leader on the market. Then, no one seems to clearly understand what we should do with it! Use it for sales pipelines? Use if for relationship management? Use it as a primary tools (like this is your main daily app)? Integrate with our core banking to retrieve infos?
And we kept spinning around for 3-4 years.
Then... we switched to another CRM. And we spent 3-4 years since then going down the same path.
My 2 cents: picking a CRM isn't the biggest challenge! It's to use it properly! But acquire one, don't develop it. You'll never get up to par with all the functions that any CRM provide.