5 Things to Do Before You Buy a Contact Relationship Management Software

If you are an impulse buyer, it is always best to refrain before buying software. There are so many on the market that you really need to find out what it is you need it to do before you spend money, especially if it is a lot of money. Here are 5 decisions to make about what you want your Contact Relationship Management (CRM) to do:

1. Who are you saving into the system? Are you keeping active clients or people who were one off clients from years ago? What about people who are potential clients? People you met networking or out and about and you could use as suppliers? The information that you hold on each of these is quite different, and you need to decide who is going to be in your list and what information are you going to hold, detailed or general, their spouses name and birthday or just their name, no personal details. It is not whether the CRM has the fields (labelled areas to hold the information), because if it has it and you don't want it you can ignore the fields you don't want. The problem arises if the CRM does not have the fields you want and you cannot add any custom fields in.
2. Contact information. Different from point one in that I am talking about actually contact with the, well, contact. Do you want to keep track of calls, emails, text messages, meetings and such? If you do you need to know how, if the software is too complicated or there is too much information that you have to enter, are you really going to keep track? Another very important thing to remember is that by keeping track of all contact with your contacts you could have reports or filters that show when you last contacted or who you need to contact because it has been too long. You need to decide if this is the type of information that is valuable to you and how you want it to look.
3. Sales information. This is usually called opportunities, how do you want to treat them and what information do you want to put in. When I use opportunities I have one opportunity such as a course I have developed for example Working with Pivot Tables, that would be listed as the opportunity. Then I would like to associate the opportunity with contacts I think would be interested in it. That may be one contact or many. Do you do the same or is it only one opportunity with one contact like in the case of a Lawyer, they can create the opportunity of divorce for a contact they hear has separated from their spouse.
4. Interaction with other software? Do you want to have to go into the CRM to write down every email you have sent? Some programs will allow you to email the program, then using the To field will file it with the contact that has the matching email. Other programs will allow you to email straight from the program so you don't use your Outlook, Thunderbird or other mail programs for business. Do you want it to create merge documents like letters?
5. Ease of use. How often do you have to go into help or are left searching for things? Even though there is standard terms that are usually used see if everything is clear for you. If you can't find what you need or it is difficult to enter information because everything has custom names that do not mean anything to you or you have to enter data in in ways that is not natural to you, keep looking.

There are a lot more that a CRM could do but thinking about these 5 will help you find a CRM that you can use for a long time. Be realistic, how much time do you want to spend in it each day? Take a test drive, most programs offer a trial period and some are free for a set number of contacts or space on their server. If you can select a CRM program early in your business before you get to thousands of contacts, you have a greater chance of keeping them organised and getting more business.

Katherine Davison

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