CRM Setup and Design

Customer Relationship Management - a critical tool for growing businesses. CRM's are used to track interactions between customers and a business, providing continuity to streamline internal processes. Typically a CRM will involve some sort of pipeline structure to map a prospective customer's journey through the lead process, before they are converted into a paying customer.

The market has become saturated with CRM tools, huge players like Salesforce are designed for large scale businesses while at the other end platforms like Pipedrive and Monday focus on small-medium sized business while products like Hubspot float somewhere in the middle. The common features between CRM's are usually prospect/sale pipelines, marketing emails, sale calls and customer service interactions.

From a modern system design perspective, it is absolutely essential to choose a CRM that integrates smoothly with other key business tools - like commerce and finance or accounting. In simple cases, integrations and automations can be handled by the CRM itself and maybe a Zapier subscription. When there is a need for complex logic, cloud hosted custom APIs are the best option to exchange and process data between platforms and the CRM as needed.

Some businesses may treat their CRM as the 'source of truth' - the definitive platform that holds all key customer information. Often this can be a mistake, with many CRM's being quite limited for any sort of sophisticated logic or analysis. Instead, the CRM should be treated as a valuable resource to feed into a data warehouse to allow for organisation wide analysis.

Talk to Wallace Corporation about your best CRM options, how to streamline and automate key actions and how to integrate your CRM with the rest of your business.

Pros:

• Very useful for managing sales pipelines and customer interactions
• Most popular CRM's can integrate with other software tools
• Small-medium level CRM's are affordable

Cons:

• Out of the box solutions are usually subpar for anything complex
• Generally not suited for a central 'source of truth' of business data
• May be complex to choose the right CRM for business needs
• Enterprise level CRM's are expensive

TLDR:

Choosing the right CRM is an important decision, but should be done with full consideration of how the CRM will work with the rest of your business systems. At small scale, and without any complex requirements most modern CRM's will offer the potential to automate basic tasks and customer interaction.