Once you’re convinced about the idea of adopting a CRM, the next important step is to choose the best suited CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool for your business; something that will work best for your workflow & make things easier for your team.

A look on the internet can be very confusing for a beginner, as you will end up having too many options for comfort ranging from free bare-minimum data managing tools to fully automated systems costing upwards of a few hundred dollars a month.

3 things to consider while choosing the ideal tool for your work:

Do You Actually Need a CRM?

Taking up a CRM involves some recurring costs. Make sure you have enough customers to manage in the first place, to make the CRM investment worth it. Otherwise for absolute beginners, spreadsheets are the most cost-effective way to initially manage customer information.

Only look for a CRM when you’ve had some journey & are struggling to manage all the information manually. As your company grows, you will need a CRM eventually. Here’s why:

• Your team has exploded & there are just too many people working on the same spreadsheet
• The team is taking too much time in just managing data
• There’s just too much sensitive data for a spreadsheet

When you feel spreadsheets are not enough, adopting a CRM makes total sense. It reduces your involvement in manual mundane tasks & all your data is secure too.

Do Proper Research

Before getting swamped by the fancy features & offers by the big players in the market, it’s always wise to put some efforts into research. Try listing out all the day-to-day tasks you & your team do every day at work, along with the number of tools they use for the same; be it lead capturing, follow up or emailing.

This will help you compare the features being offered by every CRM w.r.t. your requirements. You will surely end up with a shorter list of options to choose from.

Please note that a lot of CRMs nowadays offer seamless data migration from other platforms or spreadsheets. Hence, don’t just let go off your earlier tool when you choose to go with a CRM. Also, consider the cost or time your team will invest in adapting to the CRM.

It’s Always About Your Team

While you may be excited about the idea of using a CRM, don’t forget the most important stakeholders in this entire process… Your Team Members! They’d be the ones most benefited from the implementation of a CRM, hence their thoughts, needs & hesitations should be taken into consideration.

Without a second thought, the CRM should be easy to get started with & offer pro-active support whenever required. The learning curve has to be minimal, which will make the adoption seamless for your team.

Always keep in mind, an ideal CRM means happy team members. Happy team members mean happier customers! A well-chosen CRM will not just help your team get work done faster, the ripple effect will also be seen in customer experience.

Wakeupsales CRM is an easy-to-use, flexible & highly customization CRM tool used by more than 7,000 teams across the globe. Take a 30 days FREE Trial, you’ll love it.