CRM software: Definition, limits and how to choose it?

CRM: Definition and Purpose

What is a CRM?

The term CRM (Customer Relationship Management) actually refers to several key elements in a company's commercial development.

The company's customer relationship management (CRM) strategy

This involves decisions and objectives set by management regarding customer interaction policies. This concerns several departments, particularly marketing and sales teams, as well as customer service teams.

The customer relationship management process

This is an operational process that guides all teams to deliver a standardized customer relationship experience throughout a customer's entire lifecycle with your company.

CRM Software

Today, we primarily use this term to refer to CRM as commercial management software within companies. I bet it's this last definition that brought you to this article, and that's perfect since we'll be talking about CRM tools.

CRM Software Objectives

The main objective of this type of software is to facilitate tracking and consolidation of commercial activity. It enables sales teams to input customer data they have into a single tool (rather than across 27 different emails) throughout the sales cycle while better organizing themselves during that same cycle.

At the same time, CRM software is a highly effective tool for management since it provides an overview of commercial activity and allows real-time tracking of sales process performance.

Finally, let's be honest—at a time when sales teams are difficult to build and even more complex to retain, a CRM ensures the company capitalizes on customer data and facilitates handovers between outgoing salespeople and new hires. This is particularly true when the sales cycle is long.

Main CRM Software Features

What are the main features of CRM software (GRC in French)?

Well, basically, and to playfully annoy software publishers, the foundation of a CRM is being a digital contact directory.

Relax—of course, you're not JUST that, dear publishers.

To avoid favoritism and because we're not publishers ourselves, we'll do as they do on television. We'll mention several effective software options and favor almost none of them.

We'll be honest with you and indicate which ones we recommend most to our clients and why later in the article. There are so many that we can't mention them all, and after all, if you're reading our article, it's to get our opinion, right?

Let's return to the most emblematic CRM features:

Contact Management

Contact management for customers and prospects offered by CRMs is highly advanced. You can truly consolidate all customer data in one place. Most solutions even offer custom fields, allowing you to go very far in collecting and consolidating customer information. However, be careful not to go overboard—if you have tons of fields that aren't filled out, they won't serve you.

Simplified Contact Creation Synchronized with Your CRM

Most CRMs offer add-ons connecting to your salespeople's email accounts to automatically fill in maximum information. This can also be used on social networks to easily extract information and create contacts on the fly—a precious time-saver.

Communication and Sales Document Tracking

This email account synchronization usually goes further. Many CRMs allow you to track email opens by your contacts and monitor the opening and reading of presentations you've sent. This can be very useful for contacting your contacts at just the right moment during a sales process.

Simplified Appointment Scheduling Through CRM

Some CRM tools facilitate appointment scheduling by integrating time slot proposal functions directly into email bodies or automated appointment booking with integrations like Calendly. This might seem secondary, but all salespeople reading this understand the time saved by avoiding back-and-forth during appointment planning!

Sales Support, Email Templates, etc.

Customer relationship management tools sometimes offer functions to facilitate the sales process. From our perspective, this is one of the least well-handled aspects of CRMs today. Most will let you create email templates to save time, and some will automate part of sales document creation to more easily personalize a presentation, for example.

It's insufficient, though we can note that some tools are working on it, like NoCrm with its appointment framework tool.

Sales Opportunity Tracking

Of course, one of the master functions remains commercial pipeline tracking! This feature visualizes all prospects in the sales process with your company and at what stage they are. It's an important management tool both for leadership, who use it to forecast upcoming revenue for the next months, and for salespeople who can more simply track their activity and that of the entire team.

Commercial Performance Statistics

Finally, creating custom dashboards to track all commercial activity is also an important feature, especially for management to detect improvement opportunities or gaps in the company's commercial process.

Mobile CRMs

More and more CRMs rely on mobile to support salespeople. This isn't simply "responsiveness." CRMs like HubSpot or even SuiteCRM (which is open source) offer complete applications to support your field salespeople, capture business cards using smartphone cameras, etc.

How to Choose Your CRM Software

Defining Your CRM Tool Needs

Before considering CRM implementation, you must make a precise inventory of your needs. Not all CRM solutions offer exactly the same features and don't work the same way. Depending on your current situation, the questions to ask vary enormously.

• Who will use the CRM? How many users?
• What is this tool's main objective?
• Is there data to recover from a previous software?
• Will your CRM need to connect with other tools?
• Do you need complementary features like marketing campaign management?
• Do you need to use the software on mobile devices?

Overall, be careful not to over-equip yourself with prodigiously complex software designed for organizations 10 or 100 times larger than yours. Their cost is higher, but beyond the immediate surcharge, excessive software complexity will make it unusable for your teams.

Don't skip writing a real specification document involving all employees intended to use the tool. This guarantees you won't over-dimension or under-dimension your needs.

Your Company Culture and Parallel Projects

Beyond objective needs, your company culture comes into play. For example, you might habitually implement specialized, hyper-efficient tools in their respective domains, even if it means having several. Or conversely, prefer all-in-one tools.

If you're in the first case, tools like NoCRM and Pipedrive will be excellent for you (we love them—we'll talk about them more later). If you're in the second case, HubSpot or Zoho CRM would surely be more suitable since you can add tons of complementary tools (marketing suite, customer service suite, office suite, coffee machine... XD).

Beyond this aspect, at Sales Odyssey, we tend to think all CRMs have an underlying "culture." There are CRMs fundamentally designed by and for salespeople, hybrid CRMs integrating very marketing-oriented logic, and finally, some rarer ones that manage to combine both quite well.

Know how you function yourself to choose the tool that fits you. There's no "right" culture to have. Simply choose the tool made for you.

CRM Choice: Let Your Salespeople Choose

Or at least involve them heavily—their opinion must carry significant weight.

Why?

Because a poorly completed CRM not used daily is a useless CRM. This might seem obvious, but the reality is that manager and management choice usually takes precedence over team choice. This is a mistake. You won't manage anything if your teams don't want to use the tools.

Yes, you can use energy and constraints to force them. But think about the ROI. Isn't it more profitable to favor the solution that easily helps you reach your objective rather than the solution you like but requires energy and time to be truly adopted and therefore useful?

This doesn't necessarily seem logical—we can discuss at length that teams aren't always aware of all issues. But be pragmatic: either your team is convinced and FREELY chooses this solution, or you're buying problems with costs you can't even imagine.

The Best CRM Software for SMEs in 2021

NoCRM.io: Simple and Effective, Tailored for Your Salespeople

NoCRM is a UFO in the CRM world, as its name suggests. And I'll give you a hint—it's published by the French company "You don't need a CRM." You can't make this up, but it summarizes this solution's philosophy well.

A remarkably efficient solution designed to bring only what's strictly necessary to your sales team. The tool is pragmatic and "next action" oriented—no element is pending. Unsurprisingly, it's one of the market's only solutions to have TRULY thought about integrating prospecting list management features (yes, a suspect isn't necessarily a prospect).

You'll find all essential CRM features in a streamlined interface at a very competitive price. It's undoubtedly the solution we recommend if you have a company with strong sales culture.

NoCRM Advantages:

• 100% French solution (yes, we're patriotic)
• Very pragmatic and energizing design logic
• Very easy to use
• Dedicated LinkedIn plugin for creating contacts and opportunities directly from the social network (#socialselling)
• Unbeatable pricing

NoCRM Pricing:

• €10 per user per month for the starter version (ideal for very small businesses)
• €19 per user per month for the expert version (adds collaborative features, improved reporting, and after-sales action management)
• €29 per user per month for the dream team version (adds email tracking, template management, and sales objective management features)

Pipedrive: Very Complete with Interesting Add-ons

Pipedrive is an excellent CRM. Its quality-price ratio is very advantageous—from ergonomics to feature variety, you can't be disappointed. Pipedrive excels in its ability to connect with all sorts of tools to improve integration into your ecosystem.

It's also a solution integrating extraordinary add-ons, notably "Web Visitors," which for an unbeatable price identifies which companies your website visitors come from through their IP address. Precious information for implementing targeted prospecting or account-based marketing strategies.

There's real intelligence in the choice of proposed features. Pipedrive adapts to small teams as well as larger ones and is an excellent compromise between sales and marketing culture.

Pipedrive Advantages:

• Very complete solution easy to integrate with numerous tools
• Very interesting add-ons: LeadBooster, Web Visitors
• Integrated appointment scheduler
• Integrated automation features
• High-quality dashboard

Pipedrive Pricing:

• €12.50 per user per month for the "essential" version (basic offer to discover the tool, though missing many useful features)
• €24.90 per user per month for the "advanced" version (the real good choice for starting with Pipedrive)
• €49.90 per user per month for the "professional" version (adds advanced reporting but also two top features: e-signature and internet calling directly via Pipedrive)

HubSpot: Is Free Really That Cheap?

A well-known solution, and for good reason—the CRM is free. Let's set aside this argument for a moment.

We're dealing with a very different approach from the previous two. HubSpot is a complete marketing suite spanning from marketing automation to CRM, including CMS and customer service. Honestly, unlike some generalist solutions, HubSpot does quite well even compared to specialists in each mentioned domain.

If you're considering acquiring all solutions offered by HubSpot, it's probably the best solution for you. However, there's one caveat.

HubSpot is expensive. Whether for marketing automation, CRM, or CMS, the free version is very limited. The main drawback is also that you'll use a platform designed for much more than simple CRM. If you need it, great; otherwise, it's unnecessary distraction.

So see this as an all-in-one, all-or-nothing solution!

HubSpot CRM Advantages:

• Free offer to start!
• Solution integrated into a very high-quality complete marketing suite
• Many free marketing tools (chat module, landing page editor)

HubSpot Pricing:

• Free for basic offer
• From $50/month for two users in starter version
• $500/month for 5 users on pro version (adds personalized email sequence functionality, personalized videos directly from HubSpot, and electronic signature)

Salesforce: A CRM Software Heavyweight

Salesforce has made its place in the CRM software world. With unmatched customer support, this tool lets you track and evaluate each sales opportunity from start to finish to trigger actions based on closing probability.

You can also create quotes quickly, manage your product and price lists (including custom prices), assign tasks, and organize your schedule. Of course, contact and partner management is also considered to improve your relationships and campaigns.

Salesforce also supports lead management and pipeline organization. You can integrate lead scoring strategies to evaluate each lead and convert prospects more efficiently and quickly.

Salesforce Advantages:

• Free trial version available
• Tracks user engagement on social media
• Has mobile application
• Possesses almost all expected CRM features

Salesforce Pricing:

• €25 per user per month for "Essentials Plan" (up to 10 users for account and contact management, tracking, lead attribution, email management, custom reports, and mobile access)
• €75 per user per month for "Professional Plan" (no user limits, campaign management, dashboard customization, products and quotes)
• €150 per user per month for "Enterprise Plan" (all previous features plus numerous automated tasks, custom application development, and API access)
• €300 per user per month for "Unlimited Plan" (unlimited customizations, 24/7 free support, training, custom applications, and Cloud service)

Zoho CRM: A CRM for Automating Your Tasks

Zoho CRM is heavily focused on automation with features triggering pre-established scenarios.

Zoho has an easy-to-use interface for contact management. You can organize prospects simply and efficiently with data filtering possibilities.

This tool helps deploy marketing strategies and advance contacts through your funnel with email campaign management, lead nurturing strategies, prospecting, contact segmentation and tracking features. For managing numerous leads from different touchpoints (email, social media, etc.), you can use Zoho's Sales Signals feature.

You can also implement lead scoring strategies, create independent follow-up sequences, and automate certain actions like email sending. Thanks to its AI, Zoho independently suggests actions you could automate.

Zoho CRM Advantages:

• Free version for up to three users with basic feature access
• Easy to use with simple, practical interface
• Easy integrations like MailChimp, Evernote, Microsoft Office 365, ClickDesk, Zendesk Support, or GoToMeeting
• Mobile application for remote contact and client management

Zoho CRM Pricing:

• €7 per month per user for "Zoho Bigin" version (adapted for starting structures)
• €20 per month per user for "Standard" version (lead scoring, automated scenarios, pipelines, and custom dashboards)
• €35 per month per user for "Professional" version (Sales Signal tool, form integration management, and integrated inventory management)
• €50 per month per user for "Enterprise" version (AI tool access and multi-user portal)
• €65 per month per user for "Ultimate" version (all previous features plus monitoring solution and analysis tool integration)

Simple CRM: Complete Software Enhanced by AI

Simple CRM is Belgian software. Its "little" plus? Using artificial intelligence to facilitate commercial processes and help make appropriate decisions regarding contact management.

The AI, called HaPPi, evaluates multiple data points, ensures no problems exist, and even suggests potential clients by directly sending qualified leads to the sales team. But that's not all! It ensures automatic appointment reminders and motivates teams to excel through gamification systems.

Simple CRM also has a reporting system for analyzing sales and measuring activity ROI to judge action profitability.

Regarding contact management, all information is centralized to simplify your life. You can easily find interactions and modifications. You can also assign interest centers and add custom fields to contacts. It's a very complete software.

Simple CRM Advantages:

• Strong automation thanks to artificial intelligence
• Well-designed interface despite numerous features
• French-speaking software with French resources and information
• Good quality-price ratio and present customer service
• Available on smartphone and tablet, works offline

Simple CRM Pricing:

• From €15 for 1-5 users per month for "Starter" version (contact, task, project, document, appointment, and activity report management without commercial documents or AI advantages)
• From €25 for 1-50 users per month for "Classic" version (adds Skype and WhatsApp, Simple Payment module, and voice recognition)
• From €40 for 1-250 users per month for "Enterprise" version (adds geolocation, custom reports, commercial document management, and AI options)
• From €60 for unlimited users per month for "Business+" version (access to all Simple CRM features)

SME CRM Comparison for 2023

What's Next? Using Your CRM Tool Effectively

Intelligently Configure Your CRM Software

Okay, you've chosen a great tool and you're excited about playing with... sorry. You're stimulated by the possibilities and eager to exceed your revenue objectives (more corporate). Sorry, but you've only done a small part of the work. A CRM, even technically operational, isn't worth much in itself—it's a tool, just a tool.

It's up to you to build a relevant and efficient sales process to convert prospects. Your CRM must be configured to support this process, not the reverse.

Similarly, be careful not to configure steps, contact fields, or documents simply because the tool allows it. Above all, you must make sales team work as simple as possible. Any additional process without immediate impact on their efficiency is a waste of time and money.

Same for indicators to track. As leaders, we all love KPIs. KPIs are cool—they're concrete and help make decisions. But you know what's worse than having no KPIs? Tracking the wrong KPIs.

Remember that when you track indicators to evaluate team performance, it directs their efforts. How often I see the "Number of client meetings" indicator—when we ask for meetings, teams make them.

The problem? When we receive a request and during qualification sense it won't go further, we should avoid the meeting. But if it's still good for indicators, we'll take the meeting anyway.

Think about it—there are always two sides to your KPIs: the good and the bad. It's not a honesty problem; it's management's responsibility to think about indicator relevance. Teams are just doing their job.

Train Your Sales Team on CRM Use

Yes, this step isn't to be neglected. The sales team primarily must use the CRM, and the more comfortable they are, the more it will save time and money.

Training your team is therefore essential to understand how the tool was designed, configured, and should be used. No need to say that if your teams were involved in the decision and configuration process, training will be greatly facilitated.

Also think about documenting initial training well and possibly naming a "power-user" who knows the tool inside out. Your sales teams evolve, and this will be very important for better integrating new hires.

Ensure Your CRM Software Functions Properly

A CRM requires maintenance—always ensure contained data is accurate and all available data is properly entered into the tool. A good technique is monthly pipeline reviews with each salesperson to ensure ongoing projects are still current and complete, project contacts are well identified, and won projects are properly noted.

By basing this meeting on the tool, we gain efficiency and create tacit agreement with our team. We're evaluated on what exists in the CRM, so keep it updated.

It's also important to regularly clean your CRM. Does an inactive contact need to appear in your CRM for the next 100 years? No. Don't hesitate to delete obsolete data and regularly archive this data.

Future CRM Software?

I won't talk about mobile CRM—that's already yesterday's news. I won't talk about artificial intelligence and other trendy terms that only make sense if they bring concrete gains, and honestly, that's too rarely the case.

Today, there's a real limit to overcome for CRMs. They're still too much tracking and reporting tools. Tomorrow's CRM must serve commercial performance and can only do so by much more effectively supporting those who are its artisans: salespeople.

There's progress—NoCrm and its appointment script generation tool, for example, go in the right direction. We can also note Pipedrive add-ons that are real tools serving salespeople (and marketing).

But all this is too timid. We have very effective sales techniques at our disposal, and knowledge around customer journey modeling is much greater today. Isn't there material here to go further in supporting salespeople in their activity and helping them close deals?