Tips for Choosing a CRM - Part 3- Shortlist of Products

Shortlisting Potential Products

New Users

Mar 4

OK - you have a list of reasons as to WHY you’re deploying a CRM and a list of your must-have features. Now you’re ready to make a shortlist of potential products that fit your needs.

Here’s a few things to consider while you’re comparing the products out there; many CRM products are very different making an apples-to-apples comparison relatively difficult.

Focus on fulfilling the business requirement rather than trying to match feature to feature.

Remember to set a budget for your CRM project.

You’ll need to cover;
Monthly license fees
Initial start-up costs
Customization or Development costs.
Integrations to other software (eg. Accounting)
3rd Party Addons or requirements to enable those ‘Deal Breakers’

Keep in mind that there may also be hidden, intangible costs such as time for internal training, testing or updates to dependant systems to meet your requirements.

CRM Product Name

Monthly
Price
Per User

Annual
Per
User

Sign up
Cost

Can Self-Implement?

Implementation
Cost

Data Import Cost

If you’re working with a consultant, they will already have a good idea of the products available.

If not, ‘get your Google on’ and start shortlisting the potential products that might fit your needs. If you need help getting started, there is a short list of popular products further in this document.

Some products you can ‘self implement’. Others recommend using a partner to make sure you get the most out of them.

Start making an initial list of products that could meet your needs using the form below as an example. The goal here is to get a high level list of potential products that can meet the needs of your organization.

Once you have the basic list, you can start to narrow down from the hundreds of CRM products available to a manageable handful. Next up, we’re going to get deep into them and see which ones are actually potential solutions that will meet your needs.

Take your list of required features, show stoppers and organization needs, and start ranking the CRM products against the requirements you have gathered. Break them out and enter them into a table (like below) and then rank each CRM product as to how well each product will perform the function.

Products Shortlisted/Requirements	CRM Product A	CRM Product B	CRM Product C
Must Haves (Rank on scale of 1-5: 5 being most applicable)
Must provide remote access or online connectivity
Must provide Mobile access using phone or tablet
Must restrict access to records based on user group
Would Be Nice (Rank on scale of 1-5: 5 being most applicable)
Allow users to search records from the home screen
Give users individual dashboards for tracking work
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