Most teams should buy a CRM. The exceptions are real, and worth knowing.
A CRM tracks leads, accounts, activities and pipeline health. Off-the-shelf works for most teams. An unusual sales motion, a partner model, or a service workflow nobody else has can justify building your own on a flexible platform.
Build or buy
Buy when the standard objects, leads, opportunities and activities, plus the usual integrations, cover most of what you do. Build when your process is a genuine differentiator and a generic CRM gets in the way.
A hybrid is common: a core CRM for the accounting integration, with custom apps handling the odd workflows over an API.
Start with the data model
Companies, contacts, deals, activities. Settle the required fields, the stages and who owns what before adding anything clever.
The relationships are the point. Contacts belong to accounts, and deals roll up into a forecast. A flat spreadsheet cannot do that.
- Accounts and contacts, with the role each person plays
- Pipeline stages with entry and exit criteria
- Activity logging: calls, emails, meetings, tasks
- Custom fields that match how you qualify
Adoption is where it fails
Sales teams abandon a CRM that makes them type things twice. Connect email, calendar and phone. Make the default view the one they need each morning.
Make it work on a phone. Otherwise a field rep does the admin in a lump on Friday, from memory.
Someone has to own it
Build dashboards for pipeline coverage, stage conversion and activity volume. Those are what managers look at each week.
Give one person the job of evolving it as the sales process changes. A custom app with no owner decays as fast as a neglected commercial one.
Written by the team at Ambivo, a business platform that keeps CRM, accounting and ERP on one customer record. This article is general guidance on the topic rather than a description of Ambivo features.