Choosing a Small Business CRM Platform

Once considered primarily as a tool for sales teams to store prospect and customer contact info, customer relationship management (CRM) platforms have evolved into sophisticated suites of applications to help companies manage their sales process, automate tasks and enhance collaboration.

CRM platforms provide a convenient place to organize prospect and customer data, as well as a history of every interaction those prospects and customers have had with your small business. This provides a single, centralized source of truth that helps your sales and customer service teams share data and work together more effectively without having to look up data or files from disparate systems.

Common CRM features include:

• Contact information collection and management. This may include incoming emails or phone calls, social media profiles, customer records, or other forms of data. Some tools can capture data from incoming emails, for instance, and create prospect or customer records automatically.
• Task and activity management. You can centralize calendars, meetings and tasks on a single dashboard. This can include assigning tasks to specific team members and monitoring progress.
• Follow-up reminders and automation. The platform automatically prompts sales reps to follow up at specific periods. Some platforms have tools and templates that make it easy to add some light customization to messages as part of a process that’s mostly automatic.
• Social media integration. If someone likes or follows your Facebook or LinkedIn page, or comments on a post, their data is captured by the CRM platform for potential follow-up.
• Customizable reporting tools that help you analyze your sales and marketing efforts and identify opportunities for improvement.

Making the Best Choice

As with other tech investments, understanding your company’s needs is an important step in choosing the best CRM platform. Talk to your sales and customer service reps, who may have used CRM tools in previous assignments, about the features they would like to see in the platform. Too many companies make a choice based on what’s popular or vendor recommendations, and get a tool that’s not suited for them.

Next, examine how well a potential CRM platform integrates with the tools you already use. This may include, for example, capturing inbound call data and making outbound calls with your VoIP phone system or mobile apps. Other common integrations include communication, sales, social media, project management, and file-sharing tools to reduce the need for users to change applications on the go.

Beyond features, pay extra attention to how easy a CRM tool is to use. This is the type of system that your teams are likely to interact with frequently, and if a tool gets in the way of their work, the functionality you’re hoping to capture will be diluted or lost.

Once you have a short list of tools with your desired basic features that seem simple enough for your teams to use, it’s time to think about advanced features that can enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of your sales and customer service processes.

Pricing is often another important consideration as you compare tools. CRM platform prices often vary according to the number of users and customer records, the sophistication of features, and other considerations. Take advantage of trial periods to understand how well your team enjoys using various tools.

Many small businesses start successfully with free or basic plans, and expand capabilities as their company grows.