What a CRM for small business has to do

What a CRM means for a small business

CRM stands for customer relationship management, and the name tells you almost nothing useful.

In practice a CRM is the place your enquiries, your customers and your conversations live, so anybody can pick up where anybody else left off. If you run the business on a notebook, a phone and a shared inbox, you already have one, spread across three places that only one person can read.

Signs a small business needs a CRM

You need a CRM when you lose track of who you have quoted, when where a customer has got to lives in one person's phone, or when two of you reply to the same enquiry.

Another sign is the spreadsheet nobody fully trusts. If you have to ask around before you can answer a customer, the information exists but it is not in one place.

Start with your process, not with the CRM software

The first step in choosing a CRM is to 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, not against a feature list written by somebody who has never seen your business.

Writing the steps first is also what stops you paying for a system with two hundred features and using six.

The five things worth checking in a small business CRM

The first check for a small business CRM is whether every enquiry lands in it automatically, from every route you use. A system somebody has to remember to type into will be out of date by Thursday.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, and 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, instead of asking you to sell the way it expects? And does it work properly on your phone, out on a job?

What popular CRMs cost in the UK

Most bought CRMs charge per user, per month. HubSpot runs from a free plan to £81 a month per seat for its Professional tier, Zoho CRM is free for up to three users with paid plans from £12 per user per month, and Pipedrive's cheapest plan is £168 per seat a year, all billed annually.

The sums add up as the team grows. Five people on Pipedrive's starting plan is £840 a year and ten is £1,680, every year, before anybody moves up a tier for a feature they need.

Those are fair prices for good products. A custom CRM makes sense when the yearly figure has become significant or none of them follows how you sell.

When a free CRM stops being enough

A free CRM plan shows you what a CRM does. It tends to stop being enough when you hit the user limit, need the automations that sit in the paid tiers, or want it to follow a process the free version cannot.

When a CRM should be built rather than bought

Build a CRM 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.

Build one 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 build one when the per user monthly fee has become a real number. HubSpot's published prices, for example, run from a free plan to £81 a month per seat for its Professional tier, billed annually, and that cost grows every time you hire. It is the same reasoning as any bespoke software.

What a custom CRM looks like in practice

Tommie Courier Services sells courier training, and their customers live on WhatsApp. Their CRM was built around WhatsApp instead of email, so the conversation and the customer record are the same thing.

It holds more than 17,000 leads, tagged and staged automatically, and more than 28,000 WhatsApp messages have gone through it. The team sees one picture, in a database in their name, and nothing depends on somebody copying a message into a spreadsheet.

Moving off a spreadsheet

Moving from a spreadsheet to a CRM is mostly a tidying job. Export what you have, agree the stages a customer moves through, and clear out duplicates and dead leads before anything goes in.

On a custom build that cleaning is part of the job. For Tommie Courier Services, 673,948 attendance records came down to 15,492 real ones before a single lead went into the new system.

What a custom CRM costs to have built

A custom CRM from Fixr Systems starts from £2,000. It is scoped around how your business works, because no two are the same, and the exact price for your project is fixed in a written quote before anything starts.

It is built in stages, so you see the first piece working early. The follow ups inside it are usually the first piece of automation a business adds.

How to decide on a CRM

Deciding on a CRM starts with writing 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 crept up into real money, building 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.