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How to choose a CRM

If you are selling a product or service, chances are you need something to manage your contacts and leads. We call this a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software. It’s a tool that helps you keep track of all your contacts and their important details, as well as notes about follow up. It’s also useful for tracking your sales metrics and understanding how many people you follow up with actually become customers. 

Pretty much every business needs one, but there’s a million of them out there, so how do you choose a CRM? 

We’re obviously biased with our favorite… Crmble – the easy CRM for Trello! But we realize it’s not for everyone, and we wanted to walk you through the types of CRMs that exist and criteria to help you decide which one is right for you. To figure it out, you just need to think through a couple of key questions.

How many leads/contacts do you have?

If you have thousands or millions of leads, you probably need what’s referred to as an Enterprise CRM software. You’ve probably heard of these… they’re the big players in the space, like Salesforce, Oracle, and HubSpot. 

They come with a lot of great features and automation that help you manage the high volume of leads, but they come with a price. Literally. Expect to pay high dollar for these tools, into the hundreds or thousands of dollars a month. 

If you (like most of us) aren’t dealing with an incredibly high volume, you will have more options of tools that can handle a smaller bandwidth, while still being powerful and providing great features that help you manage your contacts for a much lower cost. 

Where do your leads come from?

Before picking out a CRM, it’s important to make sure you have an easy way of getting your leads in there. For instance, getting the leads into the CRM should be a painless process and not require additional work on your end. If you use Facebook Lead Ads, you should be able to connect your CRM to Facebook so that your contacts are automatically synced into your CRM. 

Keep in mind, thanks to automation tools like Zapier and IFTT, you can connect many apps, like your CRM and your marketing sources, even if the CRM doesn’t already have a native integration. For instance, if you keep your contacts in a spreadsheet, but you get new leads from a Typeform form on your website, you can use Zapier to set up a rule that says “when someone fills out a form, add those details to my spreadsheet”. 

While this works, using tools like Zapier can be expensive depending on what you need, and it can be very time-intensive to set up. This brings us to our next question to consider…

Do you want to build something or buy something?

While some CRM’s come out of the box ready to go, others can be built. For instance, you can take a spreadsheet and add contacts in there and use filters and formulas to help you learn about the performance of your sales pipeline. Or you could use software like Trello and build your own CRM inside of Trello.

The pros to this are that it’s extremely customizable, and you can build just about whatever you want! (Especially if you’re a programmer and have some technical knowledge.) 

The challenge is that these often take a lot of time, and involve a lot of headaches trying to make disparate systems “talk” to each other. Although not impossible to build complex systems, these often only work for the very simplest of CRM needs, as advanced functionality can require a lot of technical know-how and time to build.

If you’re not technical and if you would prefer to be running your business instead of building things for it, you’ll probably want to consider a tool for your CRM, like one of the ones we’ve already mentioned… such as Crmble! 😁

How do you know if Crmble is right for you?

If you want to organize your contacts to maximize revenue and turn more leads into opportunities, but you don’t want an expensive or complicated system, Crmble is right for you. Built on Trello, a trusted business and productivity tool, used by over 50 million people to get things done.

Give a try today for free!

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