Developing a Customized CRM vs a Ready-Made CRM: What’s Better?

Introduction. If you are an SME or a large software company owner, you probably know: keeping clients attracted is one of the true challenges in a well-supplied software development market. Given that, supporting and saving your customers data is a serious concern. With your enterprise growth, the number of clients, their interactions, and all the supporting data increases exponentially, having the need to be protected and managed smartly.

It pulls behind hardships to manage the customer flow, interactions between various departments, keeping in mind and constantly updating all the essential client details, with active reminders to keep in touch with partners and clients and an enormous number of spreadsheets and databases to track.

Look, a customer relationship management (CRM) system automates all of the processes above, and even more.

Let’s expand the CRM concept: this is a software system permitting a growing company to automatically enable the customer flow and accounting, link together the enterprise units and track all the workflow data in one place, relying on each of the customer management cornerstones such asa marketing, a sales, and a customer management module.

Further in the article, read about the CRM software types and the advantages of using this system for your company flow, its important features, and open up what’s better -buying a ready-to-use CRM vs having your custom CRM software delivered from scratch.

Types of CRM Software: a Custom CRM vs a Ready-to-Use CRM

So, with automatic management of the important customer and internal information, instead of manually processing hundreds of work documents and files, your sales team economizes the company human resources - for the sake of creating new customer prospects and multiplying the sales.

As a startup founder or a newcomer entrepreneur, you have probably faced the necessity of the demands above, so, to improve your sales flow, consider the CRM software types and choose the one that suits your company goals better.

The point is that there are two options you have to choose in between.

Here is the first CRM-building option - ordering a Microsoft Dynamics or Salesforce software as a service (SaaS), made to ease-up little businesses with no rich functionality.

While the second option is hiring a proficient developers’ team equipping you with the CRM completely tailored to your company demands.

Indeed, the standardized CRM software may do a good job for your startup if your sales and marketing teams have no need for extensive functionality, just a ready-to-use features’ set enabling your little company to run smoother right now.

Just consider that this service distributing and managing software in the cloud demands the substantial monthly/yearly subscription price, which may cost you a pretty penny in the long run.

There are the off-the-shelf CRM types:

- Microsoft Dynamics;

- HubSpot CRM;

- Salesforce;

- Sugar CRM;

- Zoho CRM, etc.

However, if your company is planning to live longer than 1-2 years, let’s look at a custom CRM that may come as a beneficial choice for you.

Revealing the key functionality of the existing CRM samples below, remember the decisive thing - your client needs are pivotal. That’s why you are to analyze carefully the existing customer management software types and assess if it potentially suits you.

Ready-to-use CRM Features and Shortcomings

A ready-up CRM comes with a narrowed set of features, most of which may not be needed at all, hindering your business operations, on one side. On the other side - each feature comes at a solid cost. With it, a monthly or a yearly subscription payment is necessary for a ready CRM solution

The complete CRM system should be installed by an external provider, trying to adjust it to your company operations, which is not always easy.

Off-the-template CRMs are usually complicated to become skillful in, with the excessive features and tools to master.

In case your sales or marketing team feels the need for supplementary functionality on top of the “standard” bundle, you’ll get a tidy sum acquiring each of them, as each new CRM component arrives with a separate costly subscription price

Each user to be included in your cloud-based system will come with an additional cost for every new member.

Most ready-to-use CRM platforms introduce adjustments and new versions that you may not need either, while deleting beneficial features or worsening their quality.

Finally, you’ll have almost no competitive advantage over your rivals, offering your clients one and the same off-the-shelf CRM system, with the identical functionality.

So, a made-up CRM is a good choice for small companies who realize: the sole excel tables aren’t a good solution to keep customers’ database in the right order, and look for optimizing their workflow cost-effectively. With it, building a long-lasting CRM for your forward-looking company, pay attention to a tailored customer management platform.

Customized CRM System Development for Your Company

As already mentioned, the CRM immeasurably streamlines your team’s work and business processes, collecting and storing all the stats on any kind of customer contact in one place, from leads to business partners.

Ripping off all the gains of the tailored CRM system development, keep in mind the cost of hiring the software engineers’ team to build your business-tailored platform versus a monthly/year subscription to a cloud CRM solution.

Though, even this expenditure will be completely well-founded and smart if you match the cost of developing your own CRM and the cost of the paid subscription in more than a 2-4 years-run.

Customized CRM: Advantages for Your Business

Developed from zero, a personalized CRM is not a templated deliverable as it targets your company specific demands. Its exclusiveness is its main prominence. To back yourself up for building the custom-made software, feel nourished with your tailored CRM attractive features:

The CRM, fully adapted to your business flow, conforms to all your company requirements and covers all the workflow tasks.

It smoothly integrates with all the existing tools in your system, with the delicate embedding into your clients’ and staff cooperation structure.

It is 100% customizable, having no necessity to purchase additional features coming each at its supplementary cost.

Respectively, having purchased a ready-made customer management platform, your business may come out with an overburdened CRM that possesses excessive features that not only help, but may also waste your money and hinder business operations

No additional payments are required once the system is delivered and installed.

With the custom CRM, the system rights and the source codes belong to you as it’s placed on the company’s servers.

Finally, in a 2-4 years’ perspective you will see a customized CRM saving your money at times, considering the contrasting burden of every month/year subscription payment.

Eventually, building your own customer management platform will give you an upper hand over your competitors as you’ll propose to your clients a unique product no one else will.

Now, look at the important steps before you order a developers’ team to build your customized CRM. Having all the necessary data under your belt, it’s much easier for you to make an informed decision on the CRM system development.

Steps to Build a Tailored CRM Platform

Building a ready-to-wear CRM will turn out to be an effective decision for a time-limited business phase or for a little startup, where you need a regular one-for-all cloud platform giving your compact sales team all the functionality they require. However, in a longer perspective, it may turn out to be a burden.

1
Shape your business goals to have a clear vision of the final product requirements.
2
Set up a list of your future CRM necessary features, with the attributes each function carries on for your work tasks, and make the list to be agreed upon by the beneficiary departments (sales, marketing and customer support). Take care as the more components you include, the more expensive your whole system will be.
3
Identify the particular roles in your interested units, with the marketing, sales, and support teams having access only to specific information, indispensable for their work assignments inside the company.
4
Secure all your users’ data making it compilable with the quality norms and law restrictions and set up the process of collecting the customer data.
5
Write down all the exigencies to incorporate into your customized CRM such as security access, speed of operation, analytics.
6
Taking a well-weighted decision to hire a skilled developers team to build your custom CRM, remember: it will cost you time and finance. Above its development cost, you will have to teach your sales managers to utilize the custom CRM software to properly use it
7
Estimate the custom CRM development costs “How Much Does It Cost to Build Your Custom CRM: Core Features and CRM Development Stages”. Based on the Entexy team’s preliminary assessment, an under-a-client CRM may cost you a high price, eventually fully justified, though

Bottom Line

Ripping all the benefits of developing a CRM system tailored specifically for your company and focusing on your first-hand demands, remember: your software system choice is a weighted process demanding competent evaluation of all the company workflow tasks.

Take into account every detail of your marketing, sales, and customer management modules’ operation tasks that will be improved most of all from installing the system, amazingly driving your company profit.

Hence, if you have well-setimated all the pros and cons, take a step to refer to the Entexy BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT MANAGER and get your CRM platform estimation with attention to every detail.

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