Custom CRM or off-the-shelf CRM? When each option pays off

A CRM organises your relationship with your customers: who each one is, what you have offered them, where each sale stands and what to do next. There are many very good CRMs on the market, and for most small businesses they are the sensible choice. But there are cases where adapting the business to the tool costs more than building the tool around the business.

When an off-the-shelf CRM is the best option

• Your sales process is the usual one: contacts, opportunities, sales stages, tasks and emails.
• You need to start now and the team is small.
• The integrations you need already exist (email, calendar, invoicing).
• You would rather pay a monthly fee than make an upfront investment.

Signs you have outgrown the standard one

• The team keeps part of the information in spreadsheets because the CRM has nowhere to put it.
• Your process has its own steps (technical quotes, site visits, approvals, contracts) that the CRM can’t follow.
• You pay per user and the bill grows faster than the value it gives you.
• You need to connect it to your own or an industry-specific program and there is no integration, or it is fragile.
• Your customers should be able to see or do things (order status, documents, payments) and the CRM doesn’t allow it.

What you gain with a custom CRM

A custom CRM reflects exactly your process: the fields, stages and alerts your team uses, not one more. It integrates with your software, can include an area for your customers and pays no per-user licences. And the code is yours: you can evolve it when the business changes.

And what it costs

It requires an upfront investment and ongoing maintenance, and at first it will have fewer general features than a market CRM with years of development behind it. That is why it pays off when the part that sets you apart outweighs the generic features. To compare properly, add up several years of licence fees and the time the team loses on workarounds, and set that next to the quote for building and maintaining your own.

The middle ground

You don’t always have to choose. Many companies keep an off-the-shelf CRM for sales and build only the part that doesn’t fit: a customer portal, a quote configurator or an internal tool connected to the CRM. It is often the cheapest way to solve the real problem.