How founders can choose a simple CRM that scales

How founders can choose a simple CRM that scales

In ancient Egypt, everything depended on the Nile. It created fertile soil for agriculture, was an essential mode of transportation, and produced materials important for everyday life. For founders and sellers, the CRM is their Nile. It has the data they need for everything they do, visibility on how their pipeline is performing, and the tasks they need to prepare for.

Whether you have an outdated CRM or you’re still using spreadsheets, having a simple CRM that scales with you can seem unattainable. But with the right process, you can find, test, and deploy your dream CRM.

Here’s how.

Pick the right goals and identify your data sources

First, why simple? And why scalable?

A “simple” CRM isn’t a “limited” CRM. A free-forever CRM might be simple, but it’s usually pretty limited. It can support skilled sellers for a time, but most teams will eventually hit a wall where it’s no longer meeting their needs. Maybe they end up with more manual work than before to shore up its weaknesses. Maybe they hit a performance cap when their deal flow accelerates. A simple CRM isn’t limited. It just doesn’t ask your sellers to do more work to use it than they’re saving by using it.

A scalable CRM adapts as your company grows. Cheap CRMs might work great in the moment, when your company is still small, fundraising, and moving fast. But as deals start to come in and your team grows, it will eventually break. Conversely, an enterprise CRM like Salesforce scales great, but it’s often prohibitively expensive and bloated for early-stage companies. A scalable CRM starts at a price you can afford early, but gives you access to more powerful features as you grow. It keeps pace with you the whole time.

Not every CRM is suited to your organization’s unique needs, even if it can be described as simple and scalable. ActiveCampaign, for example, is both simple and scalable, but it’s more suited to managing marketing campaigns than sales pipelines.

That’s why figuring out the goal of your CRM is so important.

How to set your goals

Without a clear goal, you’ll struggle to pick a CRM that’s the best fit for your team. Here are some example goals for CRMs:

• Empower a sales team to spend more time selling and less on administrative work.
• Centralize contact information for better segmentation and stronger marketing campaigns.
• Improve cross-team collaboration between sales, marketing, and customer success.
• Automate non-selling activities with AI.

These goals should be directly linked to revenue goals to help narrow down a list of suitable CRMs and get buy-in once you find the right platform.

Identify your data sources

Unless your company is just, just, starting out, you’ll already have a ton of data on customers, deals, and prospects. That data might live in a different CRM, a dozen spreadsheets, or even your founding team’s desktops.

Before you start researching CRMs, make a list of every platform where that data might live. You’ll need to know this when it’s time to migrate data to your new CRM.

Make a list of what you need from a CRM

Not all CRMs are created equal. Before you go through the process of researching, testing, and deploying CRMs, make sure you know what you need. Choose the right CRM with this simple step-by-step process.

Start with your biggest pain point

Identify the biggest problems caused by not having a CRM. Are you struggling to keep track of your pipeline? Are important conversations with prospects getting lost? Maybe valuable leads are going missing? Finding these problems will help you focus your search for the right CRM.

Determine your budget

Work out how much you can pay for a CRM while still getting a return on your investment. Remember that your budget for a CRM should go beyond the subscription cost. Factor in the time you’ll need to set it up and train your team, ongoing maintenance costs, and the price of data integrations.

Decide how quickly you need to see value

When all your focus is on rapid growth, the last thing you need is a software platform that gets in your way. You don’t have time to spin your wheels in a lengthy onboarding and deployment process. A simple, scalable CRM should start to give you a return on your investment within a few days of you signing up for it. Don’t forget about the time you’ll need to get data from your current process into your CRM—usually through data migration.

Validate problem-solution fit

Having identified the pain points you’re trying to solve earlier, now you need to compare them against what a given CRM has to offer. Does it have features that can help you solve immediate problems? Is it built for companies the size of yours?

Plan for scalability

Is the CRM you’re looking at just as effective with 10 users as it is with 1,000? What about when you start managing hundreds of deals at once? Your CRM should scale with you, meaning it can handle your deal flow at every stage of your growth. Contact limits and user-based pricing are two factors to watch out for.

Reach out to your network

Your network is likely full of founders who’ve experienced the same problems you are and use a CRM to solve them. What platforms are they using? Have they switched CRMs in the past? Getting their recommendations can significantly accelerate your search.

Test and compare multiple CRMs

When you’ve established your must-have criteria, you’ll be able to research and evaluate CRMs. You’ll rapidly eliminate options that don’t fit and be left with a shortlist you can evaluate further by comparing them on a feature-by-feature basis. From there, you can run pilot projects, usually in two-week intervals, to test individual CRMs.

How to compare CRMs

To compare CRMs, you’ll want to gather the following information:

• Expected deployment time
• Pricing
• Free plan availability
• Available integrations
• Scalability
• AI automation
• Other features

Most of this information can be found on a CRM vendor’s website. You can also consult customer review websites like G2 or Capterra to get real perspectives on scalability, pricing, and more. After you’ve done your research, you can compare CRMs based on this information in a table like this one:

With this table, you can eliminate even more options, leaving you with, ideally, one to three CRMs to test.

How to test a CRM

The best way to test a CRM is, well, to use it. CRMs with a free plan or a free trial are best for this, but you can even test paid plans relatively cheaply if you only allow a few sellers to use the tool. When you’re testing a CRM, feed it with a wide variety of data, including contacts, deals, and customers. If you want to really put it to the test, use it for two weeks or so exclusively, with no other supporting tools. That will show you what the tool can actually handle.

Pay attention to any events where the CRM excels or struggles, and make note of them. You’ll want to compare these situations across CRMs to see which one performs best.

Stop looking: Try Clarify

Clarify is a fully autonomous, AI-powered CRM that keeps your sellers doing what they do best: selling. No more manual data entry, no more comparing contact information across spreadsheets. Get back to what you do best, and let AI handle the rest.

Try Clarify for free.

Frequently asked questions: Simple, scalable CRMs

How long does it take to set up a CRM for a startup?

This depends entirely on the type of CRM you use. A complex, enterprise system like Salesforce can take weeks to deploy properly, sometimes even requiring paid experts to set up. A simple, scalable CRM like Clarify can be configured in just a few days, at which point it will start capturing leads and enriching your contact data.

What should I do if my team resists using the new CRM?

Resistance to change is natural, but showing your team what your new CRM can do can help them overcome that resistance. Highlighting and recognizing wins that were only possible with the new CRM—like accelerated data entry or even a closed deal—can help win over your most resistant team members. Appointing and training a “CRM champion,” a team member who can help the rest of the team with any issues, is great for combating that resistance as well.

How can I migrate data from spreadsheets or a legacy CRM?

Migrating data from spreadsheets or a legacy CRM can be done in a few ways:

• Exporting CSV files: These files represent your data in a format most tools can read, allowing you to import it into your new CRM.
• Using built-in integrations: Many CRMs have built-in integrations or import tools that allow you to migrate data from other popular CRMs.
• Leveraging third-party integrations: Integration providers like Zapier, Unito, or Workato can connect your legacy system with your new CRM, seamlessly transferring data between them.

How does credit-based pricing work? When is it most effective?

Credit-based pricing charges you based on how much you use your CRM. Most CRMs use per-seat pricing, meaning you pay a flat rate for each user, with your pricing scaling the bigger your team is. With credit-based CRMs like Clarify, you pay for each use of autonomous, AI-powered features. So if a single contact is enriched by AI, that’s one credit. If an automation updates a deal after a meeting, that’s a credit. Some CRMs will charge a flat price for every credit, while others will charge a flat fee for a certain number of credits.

When is it worth adding AI automation to my CRM workflow?

AI automation will almost always give your team some of their precious time back, but since implementing it can be costly, it might not always be worth it. If your deal flow is significant enough that sellers are spending hours on data entry, contact enrichment, and similar manual work, it’s usually time to consider AI automation. The time they get back will allow them to address those high-value deals, creating outsized returns for your company.

What if my integration needs change as my business scales?

Your integration needs are guaranteed to change as your business scales. A CRM with an open API and a marketplace of pre-built connectors (like Salesforce or HubSpot) allows you to add integrations as you scale or build your own.

How can I measure the ROI of a CRM after implementation?

ROI is measured by subtracting the cost of an investment from the gain of an investment and dividing that number by the cost of that investment. You then multiply the result by 100 to get a percentage. Here’s an example of that calculation:

• Investment gain: $50,000
• Investment cost: $30,000

(50,000 - 30,000) / 30,000 = 0.6666666

0.6666666 x 100 = 66.67%