What a CRM for small business has to do
A CRM for small business use has one job: make sure nobody who contacts you gets forgotten. Everything else is detail. Before you compare anything, write down the four or five steps a customer goes through from first contact to paid, because the right answer is whichever thing follows those steps without you bending them.
What the letters mean, and why it does not matter
CRM stands for customer relationship management. That tells you almost nothing useful.
In practice it is the place your enquiries, your customers and your conversations live, so that anybody can pick up where anybody else left off. If you are running a business on a notebook, a phone and a shared inbox, you already have a CRM. It is just spread across three places and only one person can read it.
Start with your process, not with the software
Write down what happens between somebody first contacting you and you getting paid. Most small businesses have four or five steps, and most have never written them down.
That list is the specification. Anything you look at is then measured against whether it follows those steps, rather than against a feature list written by somebody who has never seen your business.
Doing this first is also what stops you paying for a system with two hundred features and using six.
The five things worth checking
Does every enquiry land in it automatically, from every route you use? A system somebody has to remember to type into is a system that will be out of date by Thursday.
Does it tell you what to do next, and chase you when you have not? A list of names is an address book. A CRM earns its place by surfacing the three people you said you would ring back.
Can you get your data out, in full, on any day you choose? Can the whole team see the same picture? And does it fit how you already sell, rather than asking you to sell the way it expects?
Write down the steps a customer goes through from first contact to paid, send them over, and you get a straight answer on whether a CRM built around them is worth it.
When a CRM should be built rather than bought
When your process is the thing that makes you money. If how you work is your advantage, reshaping it to fit a product is a strange thing to pay for.
When you sell somewhere the standard tools do not go. Plenty of businesses do most of their selling on WhatsApp, and most systems treat that as an afterthought.
And when the per user monthly fee has started to be a real number. That cost never stops and it grows every time you hire somebody.
What a built one looks like
Tommie Courier Services sells courier training, and their customers live on WhatsApp. Their system was built around that rather than around email, so the conversation and the customer record are the same thing.
It holds the enquiries, the conversations and where each person has got to, in a database in their name. The team sees one picture, and nothing depends on somebody remembering to copy a message into a spreadsheet.
What it costs to have one built
A custom CRM is quoted per build, because it is scoped around how your business actually works and no two are the same. You get a fixed price against a written scope before anything starts.
It is built in stages rather than as one enormous project, so you see the first piece working early and decide what comes next with real information rather than a plan.
How to decide
Write the steps down. Count how many people need to see them, and how much you are paying per person per month right now.
If your process is the thing that makes you money, or the figure per person per month has quietly become significant, building it around you is the better spend and it stops going up. Send the steps over and you will get a straight answer on which of those you are looking at.
Before you ask
What does a CRM actually do for a small business?
It makes sure nobody who contacts you gets forgotten. It holds the enquiries, the customers and the conversations in one place, and it tells you who you said you would ring back.
Do I need a CRM at all?
If you are losing track of who you have quoted, or the answer lives in one person's phone, then yes. Write your steps from first contact to paid, and if any step depends on somebody remembering, that is the gap.
Is it better to build a CRM or buy one?
Build it when your process is the thing that makes you money, when you sell somewhere the standard tools do not go, or when the per user fee has become a real number. Otherwise the question is which one follows your steps.
How much does a custom CRM cost?
It is priced per build, because it is scoped around how your business works. You get a fixed price against a written scope before anything starts, and it is built in stages so you see the first piece working early.
Who owns the data in a custom CRM?
You do. The database is in your name and you can export everything in it whenever you want.