A guide to selecting the right CRM option for your business.

Published 8^th May 2025
By Simon Paul Spinola

In this guide, we delve into our process for narrowing down which CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system your organisation should choose.

How do I know if my company needs a CRM?

As your company grows, bottlenecks and so called 'pain points' start to appear. Have you identified any of the following in your business?

• Falling behind in generating leads and making sales outreach?
• Difficulty accessing and organising your customer data?
• Lack of visibility into sales team activities?
• Issues managing customer accounts effectively?
• Spending too much time creating reports?

If you’ve answered yes to any of the above then in our opinion implementing a CRM system would have immediate benefits for your organisation.

What should a company prioritise when choosing a CRM solution

So you’ve already learned about what a CRM is, and identified a need for one, however, given the countless options available - from simple, affordable solutions for small businesses to enterprise-level platforms designed for international teams - finding the right one can be overwhelming. So how do you identify which system is the best fit for your company?

The next step in our process is to identify what concrete problems you are looking to solve with a CRM system. Let’s take an example - you want to be able to track and manage leads efficiently.

With a CRM all the lead data you have is stored in one location, and can be presented in a visual kanban style sales pipeline. With this you can immediately get an overview of how many leads are in your system, where they are in the sales pipeline, what interactions have taken place and the status of the lead.

For example, you can:

1. Track interactions: Every call, email or meeting is logged, and you can see when no action has been taken, or when follow ups are scheduled.
2. Lead prioritisation: You can assign a prioritisation level to leads - follow up on the most valuable leads for your company first.
3. Automate routine tasks: Task reminders, follow-up emails and more can be automated, so you and your team can focus on high-value work, like personalised outreach, customer retention and meetings with potential clients rather than repetitive tasks.

A CRM would help resolve this issue, albeit it's an issue that most CRM systems can help with, so a narrowing down is required and there are several factors to consider.

Factors for choosing a CRM system

The following six factors should help you narrow down your choices - we break them down below.

• Budget
• Features
• Scalability
• Integration Capabilities
• Ease of Use
• Customer Support

Budget: Determine your monthly budget for a CRM system - there are options available in every price bracket. Most vendors operate on a per user, per month basis and offer discounts if accounts are paid for annually.

Several CRM vendors offer free accounts with limited features, these are ideal for dipping your toes into the water and getting an idea of the system’s layout and features, while also actually beginning to use their features at zero cost. These are great for single users and can be scaled at a later date. These include HubSpot and Odoo. If you’re in a low budget or no budget situation these are our recommendations. You can migrate if your needs change or scale within the systems.

Several other vendors offer free trials, including Pipedrive, Monday.com, Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce. These trials are a good way to get hands-on experience with a CRM, explore features, and get deep insights into functionality. A sales specific CRM like Pipedrive is a good bet if you have some budget and need an effective feature packed system that you want to start using straight away.

Whatever choice you are leaning towards, from free basic versions to premium solutions with advanced features, remember that although the price per user may initially seem steep for some options, when you factor in the revenue generation potential of improving your sales processes and retaining pre-existing clients, these systems will pay for themselves with some caveats.

Features: You need to determine whether you are looking for a dedicated sales CRM that is feature rich but with a laser focus on sales, or a broad spectrum solution that encompasses sales, marketing and more. Keep an eye out for CRM essential features like workflow and sales automations - these will save you time in the long run.

Dedicated vs Integrated platform

Identify the specific needs of your business. Do you need a CRM for sales, marketing, customer service, or a combination of these? Make sure the CRM you choose aligns with your requirements.

There are broadly two types of CRM systems, dedicated or integrated. Below we detail some of the rationale behind choosing each type of solution.

The reasons why you’d want a dedicated solution, like Pipedrive or Close, are numerous.

If you already have preferred software that you want to use in your tech stack for marketing, content creation etc these focused solutions may be the way to go. If you’re only setting up a sales pipeline the cost effectiveness, and simplicity of training are also big ticks in these systems boxes.

Dedicated solutions tend to be very well integrated into the tech ecosystem, given that they are designed to operate as part of your tech stack. We recommend focusing on dedicated solutions if you are looking to get processes up and running quickly, have a single use case for a CRM or have a pre-existing tech stack that you aren’t currently looking to move away from.

Conversely choosing an integrated solution that covers multiple business needs, like HubSpot, can give you a single integrated platform that covers many of your businesses needs under one roof. HubSpot, for example, consists of several “hubs” each aligning with a different part of your sales process, from lead prospecting through to customer service.

Integrated platforms further centralise your customer data and give you a holistic overview of your customer journey. One thing to note is that integrated platforms can carry initially higher costs due to the broad scope of their platform in comparison to dedicated platforms. We recommend looking at integrated systems if you have a budget, and are looking to cover more than one department's needs.

Scalability: Both dedicated and Integrated platforms can scale with your company. You can add functionality via tiered pricing structures, and expand your teams by adding “seats” or “users”. This gives you a standardised monthly cost increase for maintaining your CRM system when you add additional team members.

Most CRMs offer multi user access to the same sales pipelines, meaning that teams can easily cooperate. We recommend that you investigate the costs of scaling before committing to a CRM, adding users and functionality can add up quickly.

Integration Capabilities: If you’re leaning towards a dedicated CRM platform, then this is especially important. Ensuring that the CRM can integrate with the other tools and systems you use, such as email platforms, marketing automation tools, and e-commerce systems can be done easily. CRM vendors have “marketplaces”, where you can align your tech stacks, for example Pipedrive integrates with over 400 other applications, details of which you can find here.

A quick search for the CRM title and “Integrations” should help you find your way to the CRM vendors marketplace.

Some essential integrations we recommend checking for are your organisation's email provider, Automation tool Zapier, your company's calendar app, Social media channels your company uses and your chosen billing application.

Ease of Use: Often overlooked, but you should select a CRM that is user friendly and intuitive. If it's too complicated, your team might not use it effectively, negating its benefits. Even when leaning towards an integrated solution our recommendation is to start with mastering one aspect of it and grow your use of the system from there.

Several vendors offer free certifications that can help guide you in the right direction. Remember a CRM system is only as good as the training your team has to use it. Without training many of the core functions will go unused, and adoption rates will suffer. We recommend certifying your team, the time it takes is minimal versus the growth potential it makes possible.

Many of the systems we’ve already mentioned are easy to set up initially, but require a level of expertise to maximise their potential. Complex features such as data migration, if you’re migrating to a new CRM, need to be taken into account - you will need to match data fields which can be a tricky task. If a CRM is being added to your pre-existing tech stack, integrations will need to be set up, and in order to maximise efficiency - automated workflows and triggers need to be put in place. These more complex features can be put in place over time, but some require expert advice.

Customer Support: With sometimes complex implementations and customisation options customer support from the vendor is essential. Check they have certified partners in place so you can work with third parties to set your CRM system up, or if they offer house onboarding seriously consider it, so you can get off to the right start.

Remember, customer support takes many forms, look for troubleshooting guides, certifications and training courses you and your team can take, user and expert forums and documentation available to help you work through any issues.

Conclusion

While there are numerous options out there, selecting the right CRM for your business can transform how you manage customer relationships and drive growth. Take the time to evaluate your needs, and don't hesitate to reach out for expert guidance in making this important decision.

We know it’s not always easy to make business-critical software decisions. We help by assessing the needs of your business in consultation with you, calculating the total cost of ownership per month, and guiding you through using the software.