Choosing a CRM: seven questions that matter

1. How many steps does it take to log one conversation?

This is the most important question of the seven, and you can ask it in any demo: show me how I write up a phone call and set a follow-up.

Count the clicks. Count the mandatory fields. If it's more than a handful you won't do it at the end of a busy day, and within a month your records won't be true. A CRM that's half full is worse than no CRM, because then you're trusting something that's wrong.

2. What happens to your data if you leave?

Ask directly, and keep asking. Can I export everything, notes and history included? Can I do it myself, without raising a request? In what format?

A supplier who's vague here is telling you something useful: part of their business model rests on how much effort leaving takes. That's not a reason to walk away on the spot, but it belongs in the comparison.

3. Per user or per company?

Most packages charge per user per month. That sounds fair and sometimes is, but it has a side effect that only shows up later: every new colleague costs money, so you stop giving everyone an account.

And then it's incomplete again. The office doesn't look in, the engineers log nothing, and you have a system with half the picture in it. For every quote, work out what it costs if your team doubles in two years.

4. How much setting up is needed before it works?

Some packages can do anything, provided you configure them first. For an organisation with someone whose job that is, that's a reasonable trade. For a business of five people it's usually a trap: the configuring gets postponed, and until it's done the thing returns nothing.

Ask for the shortest route: what is the minimum I have to do before this is useful to me this afternoon? If the answer is a project of weeks, what you're buying is mostly the complexity of the product.

5. What isn't in it?

This is the question you learn the most from. A supplier who can readily list what their package deliberately doesn't do has thought about it. A supplier who says everything is possible is selling you something that will turn out to be twenty screens.

More to the point: check whether what's missing would actually be missed. Plenty of small businesses already have bookkeeping software and an email client that work fine. A CRM that bolts those on rarely gains you anything and always costs attention.

6. Where does the data sit, and who can get at it?

You stay responsible for your customers' personal data even when somebody else runs the software. Under UK GDPR you're the controller and the supplier is your processor, which means there has to be a written contract between you setting out what they may do with it. The Information Commissioner's Office is the regulator to check that against, and a serious supplier has the contract ready rather than something to negotiate.

In concrete terms: you should be able to say where the data is held, you should be able to delete a customer's record when they ask, and you should know who at the supplier can read it.

Then ask two questions the NCSC puts at the top of its guidance for small organisations: how are backups taken and how would I restore one, and can I switch on two-factor authentication for my team's accounts? Those two cover more real-world risk than most security pages on a supplier's website.

7. Who helps you when it goes wrong?

Not whether there's support — everyone claims that — but who's at the other end and how long you wait. At a small supplier it's often someone who knows the product. At a large one it's a first line that passes you on.

A cheap test: before you buy, send their support a real question. What comes back, and how fast, predicts more than any promise on their site.

How to decide

Put the two or three packages that are left next to each other and judge them on questions 1, 3 and 5 — steps, pricing model, and what's deliberately absent. The rest is rarely where it goes wrong. For the third of those, what a CRM really costs sets out the four places the money goes.

Then run the only experiment that tells you anything: put your live opportunities in, and after four weeks check whether every one of them still has a next step with a date on it. That's the measure. If it doesn't, the package isn't the problem you need to solve next.