Which CRM to choose for a startup or SME?

DMT has been supporting start-ups for several years in the digital transformation of their marketing and sales activities. On the road to growth, many of them contacted us for specific questions about their use of CRM or around the choice of a solution. With this article, let's take stock of startups and their use of CRM!

Why adopt a CRM and use it with rigor?

When a company starts up, CRM needs are not necessarily obvious from the start, and excel files or other standard and free tracking tools can do the trick. When a company is developing, controlling sales performance, managing the pipeline and managing customer or prospect contacts is a must. This raises the question of the CRM or Customer Relationship Management system. In the theme of the digital transformation of the marketing - sales axis, CRM is to sales people what marketing automation is to marketers.

This interface will make it possible to measure and improve commercial productivity, streamline exchanges, and set up reporting and performance monitoring tools. It is this same CRM that we will eventually connect with billing tools, issuing quotes, marketing automation. CRM is the crossroads of business! In this sense, the data must be up-to-date, well-informed and all stakeholders will have to use it seriously in order to fulfill its use. What is the point of launching marketing campaigns on poorly segmented leads? Why generate leads if they are not treated in time?

What philosophy to adopt around CRM?

In startups that are beginning to structure, we encounter several scenarios. They are sometimes equipped with a little Sales force / exploited, they sometimes have a simpler tool like Pipe drive or if the subject was taken seriously, they will have implemented a tool like SugarCRM or Microsoft Dynamics in a very successful way. Their use is often limited to managing business monitoring and planning results and resources. When the marketing starts to get involved, things get more complicated and you will have to anticipate the connection to a marketing automation tool or other third party tools.

Faced with these connection needs, not all CRMs are equal, in the same way that they do not all offer the same possibilities in terms of customization. Our position on the subject is that a simple CRM is very suitable for simple or standard businesses in their operation, while complex companies will have to rely on a highly customizable and flexible tool like Sales force. To be a little more concrete, here are some options:

The Hubspot CRM: simple and rather powerful!

In the CRM family that interfaces well with marketing automation, we must mention the CRM Hubspot. It is a tool that we have met and implemented successfully at start-ups or SMEs and which has several advantages. It will be particularly easy to set up and use, which will facilitate the adoption of sales. Easily integrated with Outlook, Gmail or the tools of enablement Hubspot, it is a powerful tool and we find it very efficient. However, the tool does not offer very advanced customization on topics such as: user rights levels, customization of views, granularity of information, and management of complex product lines, basic partitions ... Also the tool will be especially interesting if you are interested in term by the Hubspot Marketing solution that will be directly backed by the same interface.

This product is a major development axis at the publisher which makes many investments on this subject. It will therefore follow this product closely! Last but not least, Hubspot CRM is free no matter how many users or prospects are integrated! Be careful though to properly qualify your databases and contact files because otherwise your license fees listed Hubspot Marketing (it is necessarily the same database if you use both products) will explode.

Microsoft Dynamics: the candidate of the full Microsoft

Microsoft has long suffered from a somewhat dusty reputation in the landscape of startups and SMEs with underdeveloped API environments and on-premise solutions. Microsoft has evolved a lot on these topics and is a company that is strongly positioned today in the cloud with comprehensive and powerful software suites. This is also the case for Microsoft Dynamics CRM!