Choosing a CRM for a growing business

A CRM, or customer relationship management system, keeps every contact, conversation and deal in one place, so nothing depends on one person’s memory or inbox. Salesforce’s introduction to CRM explains the idea well. The hard part is not buying one. It is choosing one your team will use every day.

Start with how you sell, not with features

Where do your leads come from: website forms, WhatsApp, phone calls, referrals?
What steps does a deal go through before it is won?
Who needs to see what: sales, support, finance, managers?
Which tools must it connect to: email, accounting, payments, your website?

The main options

HubSpot CRM: easy to start with a free tier, strong for marketing and sales together.
Pipedrive: simple and visual, built around the sales pipeline.
Zoho CRM: affordable and broad, part of a large suite of business apps.
Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales: powerful and highly customisable, suited to larger or more complex teams.
Odoo CRM: open source, and part of a wider system that includes invoicing and inventory.

When a custom system makes sense

Off-the-shelf CRMs fit most businesses. A custom system, or a flexible base like Airtable, makes sense when your process is unusual, when the CRM must sit at the centre of operations rather than only sales, or when per-user prices become a large cost as your team grows.

Connect it to everything else

A CRM is only as good as the information in it. Connect it to your website forms, email and messaging, for example through the WhatsApp Business Platform, so contacts arrive on their own. Tools such as Zapier and Make link most popular apps without code.

Handle customer data with care

A CRM holds personal data, so decide who can see what, keep only what you need and make it easy to delete a contact on request. If you have customers in Europe, EU data protection rules apply wherever your business is based.

Make sure people use it

Keep the first version simple, import clean data, and train the team on the five things they do every day. A CRM people trust beats a perfect one nobody opens.