When starting to work out how to choose a CRM for your business the best place to start is, naturally, at the beginning.
What Is a CRM?
CRM stands for customer relationship management. Simply put, CRM helps manage your customer data by supporting sales management, delivering insights, integrating with social channels, and offering a way to communicate as a team.
Depending on your business and the type of products or services you provide you will need different features for your CRM. So, looking into how to choose a CRM for your business is a critical step for your business, whether you are a new startup or you are realizing what you have right now just isn’t working anymore.
This guide will help you figure out how to choose a CRM for your business and offer what we believe is the best overall solution for customer relationship management.
What Should I Look For In a CRM System?
When discerning how to choose a CRM for your business there is one avoidable mistake that plagues many companies: trying to find ways to make popular CRM systems work for them rather than concentrating on their own needs and business priorities.
As we start to figure out how to choose a CRM for your business you need to ask yourself a couple of questions:
What processes in your business are inefficient and how would a CRM improve these processes?
Are there any workflows we need to put in place?
Who is going to use the CRM?
Which systems will need to integrate with the CRM?
What is our budget?
Now that you have asked yourself these questions you should be able to better understand what you should look for in a CRM system.
However, this still doesn’t fully answer the question of how to choose a CRM for your business. For this, we need to take a deeper look into a couple more factors before we begin our search process.
What Does a Good CRM Look Like?
As you start to solidify your plan to figure out how to choose a CRM for your business there are a few things to evaluate what a good CRM looks like. You need to decide if it is deployed where you need it to be, does it have the features you need, can it integrate with your other systems, do you like the UX, and does it fit your budget.
Once any particular CRM has tested positive in these areas, then it can be considered as you move forward with how to choose a CRM for your business.
Cloud vs On-Site CRM
One of the first questions you need to ask yourself as you evaluate how to choose a CRM for your business is this: is the CRM deployed via Cloud or On-site.
This may seem a strange place to start but it is worth it to invest plenty of time in this first assessment for your CRM search. Whether your business is primarily operated online or offline doesn’t matter because this is a question of how reliant your business is on the immediate accessibility of your CRM sources.
If you go with a CRM that is deployed via Cloud, then you will only have access to it so long as you have an internet connection. If it is deployed on-site, however, then you own the software and can access it regardless of internet connection.
The benefit of having a CRM deployed via Cloud is the ease-of-use and accessibility. The downside of On-site deployed CRM is you will need a local IT personnel who can fix any problems that may arise, so this has to be evaluated as well.
Necessary Features
Two of our questions about how to choose a CRM for your business above essentially boil down to the discussion about features: will it help improve your faulty processes and can it create efficient workflows?
Only you can truly know what processes are and are not working with your current CRM system (or lack thereof). These will be your necessary features. It is important to note here that there may not be a single CRM that can supply all your necessary features, but you should try to find a CRM that meets as many of your needs as possible.
Maybe you need your CRM to effectively send, receive, and track invoices. Maybe you need a CRM that collects customer information and allows you to send emails directly to your customers. Take the answers to your questions from earlier and filter those down into necessary features and use these as you move forward figuring out how to choose a CRM for your business.
Integration
This one is pretty obvious and it is easy to determine whether or not a CRM integrates with your other systems. Many CRM systems will show you on their website somewhere what programs and systems naturally integrate with their system or not.
Just as you figured out which features you need, so should you figure out which of your other systems you need to be able to integrate with your CRM. Once you have done this, then you are one step closer to figuring out how to choose a CRM for your business.
UX & Functionality
Earlier in this guide we asked you to figure out who is going to use the CRM. This is a simple-yet-vital task when it comes to discerning how to choose a CRM for your business because whoever is going to use it needs to want to use it.
If the CRM meets all your requirements but is clunky and difficult to learn and use, then all you’ve done is create an extra headache with a steep learning curve for whoever is in charge of the CRM. The UX needs to be functional or else it isn’t worth it in the long run.
The last thing you want is to invest all this time in discovering how to choose a CRM for your business for your employee (or yourself) to complain about the CRM or struggle for weeks to use it effectively.
Budget Friendly
Last, but certainly not least, is knowing whether or not the CRM will fit your budget. It isn’t rocket science to understand that to know how to choose a CRM for your business means knowing to find something that you can afford. More importantly, you need to take a look at if you can afford to scale the CRM with your business. Again, simple, but incredibly important when learning how to choose a CRM for your business.
How Do I Choose a CRM For My Business?
Now that you have done all the work to sort out how to choose a CRM for your business it is time to actually choose a CRM for your business.
There are plenty of great CRM options available, but there are only a small handful that will meet your needs we have discussed here. As you move forward in the process of selecting a CRM, we have one CRM that we highly recommend for any business at any stage because it is nearly infinitely scalable and flexible enough to perform just about any customer relationship management task you can think of. Plus, they are adding features regularly.
This CRM has a robust free version, reasonably priced packages for added features, and fully customizable organization for whatever you like.
We are talking about ClickUp*.
Why We Recommend ClickUp For a CRM
As previously mentioned, ClickUp is nearly infinitely scalable and flexible to fit whatever needs you may have for a CRM. One of the best parts about ClickUp, though, is how easy it is to adjust the framework provided into a powerhouse CRM that fits your exact needs.
ClickUp functions off a task-oriented base with a simple-yet-effective hierarchy that goes as such:
Workspace → Space → Folder → List → Task → Subtask
This simple structure let’s you create a natural flow of projects and team members who are working on those projects, letting you break each project down into as many tasks as you want to get the job done.
From here, the beauty of ClickUp shines through in the numerous features you can use or not use! We will break down a few of our favorite features ClickUp provides and how they can be used for a brilliant CRM.
Views
One of ClickUp’s defining features is the Views options it has in it’s toolbelt.
You can view everything as a simple list of tasks with different categories, the classic Board View (think similar to Trello), the Table View to display everything like you would on a spreadsheet, or even show tasks with a date attached to it on a Calendar View. The Calendar View is nothing to shake a stick at either as it can integrate with a variety of other popular calendar apps.
ClickUp offers far more Views than this, though. A few that are particularly unique and viable options for a CRM: Box View displays are team members with task assignments, their workloads, their progress, and their time tracked within the app, Timeline View lets you see everything on a timeline to see what customers are in what stage of the process and about when clients and customers can be moved through the process, or even visualize your entire CRM as a mindmap with the Mindmap View.
Whatever visualization works for you it is almost guaranteed that you will find it in ClickUp.
ClickApps
ClickUp houses a powerhouse of additional features that can be flipped on or off depending on exactly how you want your CRM to function through ClickApps. All of these features cover a wide array of options to customize ClickUp to be your perfect CRM.
Some ClickApps are so feature-rich that we will cover them separately below. That being said, some of our favorite features include: Custom Fields to create essentially any sort of extra data field you may need for each task, Custom Task IDs to have tasks in separate Spaces or Folders that can still be searchable within ClickUp, LineUp to create tasks in the order they need to be completed for team members, Multiple Assignees to have multiple team members focused on one project, Priorities for setting task priority and importance, and Time Tracking & Time Estimates so everyone can keep accountable for how much time they are investing on certain tasks and projects.
This is merely scratching the surface of all the ClickApps available to customize ClickUp into the perfect CRM. We strongly recommend taking time to invest in learning these ClickApps to determine if they will help or hinder your CRM efforts.
Relationships
A ClickApp that deserves discussion all its own is the ability to assign Relationships and Dependencies to tasks and projects.
With this feature you can designate previous invoices with a client via a Relationship so any work being done on any other tasks with this Relationship can reference one another quickly and easily. To take it one step further, you can also assign Dependencies for tasks. This allows you to not only create a Relationship between tasks but to also make some tasks unable to be worked on or completed without doing an earlier task first. This allows you to create systems of operation within ClickUp to get things done the right way, in the right order, every time while maintaining a web of connections.
Relationships and Dependencies are powerful CRM tools to help create a cohesive database of client and customer relationships and all relevant information.
Communication Features
A few ClickApps fall under the category of Communication Features that are worth discussing. The obvious ability to comment on tasks is wonderful, but ClickUp gives you the opportunity to take it a step further.
Emails can be created, attached, or sent directly from a task with the email associated with the team member working on the project. This is huge to be able to work on a task for a client, see the need to start communicating with them, and be able to do some directly from the task without ever leaving ClickUp or switching back and forth between screens, tabs, or programs while drafting the email.
Who’s Online is another ClickApp that can be utilized to communicate quickly with another team member who is immediately available on ClickUp without needing to switch tabs, screens, or programs. This can help increase productivity and focus on a task without the distraction to switch to a different communication method to get a quick response from team members.
Zoom is another fabulous ClickApp that integrates with ClickUp to create the ability to host and virtually meet from within ClickUp using your Zoom account. Once again, reducing the friction of switching between apps increases focus and productivity.
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Workflow
One of our favorite features offered by ClickUp through a combination of ClickApps is the ability to create workflows within ClickUp for your CRM needs.
Using the Recurring Tasks ClickApp as well as the Automation feature positions you to automate a lot of processes for your business CRM. If you are wondering how to choose a CRM for your business, then the ability to create automated workflows is hugely important.
By setting up automations for tasks that are created, changed, reach their due date, etc. coupled with the ability to set up recurring tasks automatically can create a feedback loop so you don’t have to worry about setting up processes more than once. Instead, you can focus on working on the process and letting ClickUp do the rest for you!
Integrations
Earlier in this guide we mentioned the importance of integrations with your current programs, apps, and software you use for your business. Well, ClickUp has one of the most robust collections of integrations currently available on the majority of CRM applications and software we have seen.
If you want to check to make sure your current apps are able to integrate with ClickUp, then we encourage you to check out their integrations page. If yours isn’t now, then don’t be surprised if ClickUp ends up creating an integration for it someday, or you might even be able to reach out to your particular program developer about using ClickUp’s public API to create their own integrations, as other companies have done (near the bottom of the integrations page).
Looking For Some Help to Market Your Local Business?
So, do you feel more confident about searching for how to choose a CRM for your business? Is there anything we missed? What CRM is your go-to favorite? Obviously, we think ClickUp is the best out there for just about everyone! At Catalyst Brand Group we focus on implementing proven growth strategies in brand, platform, and growth that will help your business grow by 2x-3x per year. If you are looking for a good CRM or for some help in other areas of your business, then Contact Us to start a conversation about how we can help.
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