CRM vendor & system choice

The CRM market is made up not only of companies that focus on business’s of varying sizes, but also how the solutions are delivered. CRM Solutions can either be delivered as an on-premise application that the customer licenses outright or as hosted rental solutions. There can be varied costs to these approaches. With an on-premise CRM solution, the company typically pays a one-time license fee and has rights to the software forever. With a hosted, rental solution, a company typically pays a monthly rental fee, but will need to pay this monthly fee as long as it wants to utilize the software. Although hosted rental systems can appear at ?rst to be less costly than on-premise systems, once a comparison is done at the hard costs – these rental systems can become far more expensive.

As discussed before, there are CRM vendors that focus on small, mid-market, and large companies. Most vendors that focus on small businesses offer simple contact management systems that primarily focuses on account management features and is meant for single users or a small networked group of users.
Typically, these systems are fairly inexpensive but provide a simple feature set with limited customization capabilities.
Many mid-market companies are looking for more sophisticated systems that offer greater breadth of functionality, run on relational database technology, can be easily customized according to a company’s requirements, and are easy to use. Mid-market companies are looking for appropriate features but do not want to over-buy a CRM system which could be a costly mistake.
Large companies often times may indeed be looking for very sophisticated CRM solutions that cover the sales, marketing, and customer service areas of an organization. Again, these companies are looking for solutions with an excellent feature set, high customizability options, the ability to integrate the CRM solution to third party applications, etc. Large companies as well are looking for an appropriate solution but often are concerned about over-buying.

For large companies as well, this can be an extremely costly mistake.

Lets making your checklist

When you’re researching what vendors will be the best ?t for your company there is a signi?cant amount of criteria to consider. Your checklist should certainly outline the most critical and important priorities your company has to properly automate the CRM areas for your company. However, one critical mistake many companies make is allowing for “scope creep” to settle in on their CRM evaluation. “Scope creep” refers to CRM evaluations and implementations where companies believe they need to over-automate and include many unneeded features in their CRM system that users will rarely take advantage of. This can certainly lead to companies over-buying their CRM system, picking the wrong solution, and implementing
a system that will take far longer to implement and not meet their budgetary guidelines.
Some of the key components that we suggest in your checklist are the following:
a. Selecting a CRM vendor that meets a realistic feature set 
b. Selecting a CRM vendor that focuses their Research and Development on ease of use. If the software isn’t easy to use, it won’t be used. 
c. Selecting a CRM system that is extremely customizable according to the speci?c needs of your company 
d. Selecting a CRM system that can be implemented in a short amount of time. Typically thirty to ninety days. 
e. Selecting a CRM system that is affordable. After all, a CRM system is supposed to save you money and give you a good return for your investment.