Choosing a CRM for a small services business

CRM software is sold to enterprises and bought by two-person studios. The result is an expensive tool used as an address book, abandoned within a year.

Under about 50 active contacts

You do not need a CRM. A well-structured shared document, or a simple client list in whatever system already holds your orders, is enough. The overhead of maintaining a CRM exceeds its value at this size, and the honest advice is to wait.

50–300 contacts

Now you need something. What you actually need is short: a contact record, what they asked for, what stage the conversation is at, when to follow up next, and where the files are. That is five fields.

Most businesses at this size are better served by something small and boring — or by a client area built into the system they already use — than by a platform with pipelines, sequences and scoring they will never configure.

Above 300, or more than three people selling

A real CRM starts to earn its keep: shared visibility, handover between people, reporting on where deals stall. This is the point at which the licence cost is smaller than the cost of not knowing.

The features that actually get used

• A single record per client with contact details and history.
• A next action with a date. The single most valuable field in any CRM.
• Notes from calls, written immediately.
• Documents attached to the client — the offer, the contract, the brand files.
• A simple stage: lead, active, paused, done.

The features that do not

Lead scoring, in a business with forty leads a year. Elaborate automation sequences. Fifteen custom fields nobody fills in. Anything requiring the discipline of a full-time sales team that you do not have.

The test

Will the person entering the data get something back from having entered it? If the answer is no, the data will stop being entered within two months, and an out-of-date CRM is worse than a notebook. Design for the person typing, not for the report you imagine wanting.