Solving our own pain points. What CRM should we use?
We work with organisations who’s ambition is to prioritise people first. Solving their knowledge management and process pain points, using off the shelf web apps. We often need to solve those same problems for ourselves.
One of the most common problems is storing sales information.
Here’s some examples:
Who they are
What the deal is and how it’s progressing
Contact data
Tasks related to following up so we don’t drop balls
Building resilience so every team member can access the information in a hit-by-bus scenario
Syncing with any outreach tools
There’s a myriad of CRM’s to choose from (as you probably know already). So trying to decide which one, can be a really hard challenge.
Our learning approach
Try small experiments,
with familiar tools,
that are low cost cost (in time and money) ie. no Salesforce or Hubspot.
Our journey to find a CRM
Google Sheets. In the beginning, a Google Sheet was fine. There were only a few clients and limited leads and it gave us enough data to be useful without spending too much time on it. However, as we grew, data increased, then it needed to be related together (person has an organisation has a deal which has a task). The spreadsheet got harder to manage, at the same time we were reviewing CRM’s for a client and decided to try the one we recommended to them.Agile CRM. Our first attempt. Tried the free version but it was relatively clunky (circa 2017). It quickly became “wallpaper” as it was too complex for what we needed.
Airtable. Then, because we were using Airtable in lots of contexts anyway, we created our own there too. It worked alright for a year or two but in the end found familiar challenges across all of our Airtable workspaces (ours and clients). Also too hard to keep up to date, no front end so hard to show a simple view or create different user roles. ( circa 2018 - well before Interfaces).
Pipedrive is our current tool (2020+), we have one primary user so it’s fairly cheap (though if we wanted multiple people doing sales the cost would escalate quickly). It’s used by many of our clients, is really intuitive and great to use. It has potential to be integrated in to more sales and marketing processes too. However, for a micro agency it may be a tad more than we need, and not integrated in to our primary knowledge base (Notion) so it’s starting to gather dust. We’re currently weighing up whether it’s still useful enough or not.
Notion. We’ve been growing our use of Notion since 2021. We’re currently running an experiment with it to see whether it can do enough to takeover from Pipedrive. If it can do enough, all of sales and key project info will be in one place. However, it doesn’t integrate well with sales and marketing tools so that might be the deal breaker, we should know by the end of the year…
Knack. We are a Knack development team but decided that what we needed for sales knowledge doesn’t require sophisticated custom logic for different user roles, multiple free logins, powerful integration and automation options. We ARE using it for our project budgets to integrate with Xero and Toggl (our time tracker) though, as it’s far better at that than Notion and no other tool is quite right for our budget.
That’s our 7 year journey to find the right place to store our sales knowledge.
If you’ve been going on a similar journey, here’s some possible questions to help you get there quicker:
Do you have a lot of related information that’s unique to your organisation? And/or language/culture that is really key in these processes?
ie. The way a CRM is structured is for the masses, so, will its structure work for your organisation…?
Specifically, is language really important for you?
Where is your sales information currently? In a spreadsheet? In another CRM?
A spreadsheet will need some massaging to get the data in the right form for migrating, especially if you’ve managed to squeeze all the information on to one tab!
Another CRM will likely enable much easier migration
Do you have a sales team?
Yes - you’re going to need a good budget and a more sophisticated tool
No - you might be able to save money by sharing one login if most of the sales comms are done by one person
Does it need to integrate with other tools?
Do you need to capture data from a lead gen form on your website?
Do you need to update a project management or project budget tool?
Do you want it to sync with your emails (you’ll pay more but it makes keeping on top of things a lot easier)
Adding contacts from LinkedIn?
If it does, again you’re going to need a more sophisticated tool
Do you have a lot of communications and activity with leads you need to keep track of? eg. multiple calls everyday.
If you pay enough, off the shelf CRM’s (eg. Pipedrive and Copper) will fully integrate with your inbox which means every email you send to that contact is kept track of, without you having to do anything. Cheaper price plans require you to forward or BCC which you’ll invariably forget to do!
How tech savvy are your team?
Off the shelf CRM’s have invested millions in being either really usable (eg. Pipedrive is quite a focussed interface) or really functional (eg. Hubspot does EVERYthing) which means they might be easier for a non tech savvy person to use.
Do you already have a customised web app or collaborative platform?
If they’re already there, it may not be hard to add some more information in an existing tool, rather than paying for another
As a principle it’s sometimes easier to get teams to do another small job in the same tool than add a whole new tool and it’s typical long arc of learning.
If we were doing this all again, the answers to those questions above would help us to tell which path to go down:
Need an off the shelf CRM
Team not tech savvy
lots of sales activity needs to be tracked eg. emails, tasks, meetings
Need integrations with lot’s of other platforms
Use a collaborative platform (eg. Clickup, Notion)
Team have some tech sense, sales activity is simple to track, would be great to integrate with lot’s of other team information but doesn’t need to integrate to other sales and marketing tools.
Use a customised web app - Not much comms activity to track, sales data needs to integrate with lot’s of other related custom internal data, language/culture is really important for your organisation