As a newly formed or established business, you may have realised the importance of aligning your business processes with your front-end sales methods. If a business is struggling to organise their workloads, they will rush into investing in any CRM software that they believe will benefit them.
Although taking that step is important and you may see some benefits from beginning your CRM implementation, devising a plan and potentially looking deeper into tailoring your CRM for your business needs is what needs to take place.
In this post, we’re going to discuss when you would need a bespoke CRM and whether this is the answer to organising and nurturing your customer relationships going forward. Read on to learn more!
Off-The-Shelf CRM vs Bespoke CRM: The Main Differences
Customer relationship management (CRM) is an extremely important process for ensuring that your customers are satisfied and continue to remain by your side during your mission.
Businesses can often lose their current customers because they focus too much on the first sale, rather than keeping them in the loop - regardless of whether they’ve purchased your products or services already.
To keep fresh and existing customers happy, business processes have to be put in place and a CRM is a great way to ensure that they’re receiving the attention they deserve. Yet, what are the differences between conventional CRM development and a bespoke CRM solution for your business? Let’s take a closer look:
‘Off-the-Shelf’ CRM
Although an off-the-shelf CRM and a bespoke CRM have the same purpose of nurturing customer relationships and making sure all data and marketing align with keeping customers satisfied - there are some clear differences in the way that they are utilised. First, we’ll look at the ethos behind off-the-shelf solutions:
- You obtain pre-programmed CRM software that can be implemented into your business immediately
- Simple to install process
- Affordable pricing options
- Begin implementing CRM practices right away
- Doesn’t require your staff to be trained
- Lots of free trials are available (until you find the CRM software you enjoy)
As you can see, if you use a CRM plug-in that is automatically set up for you - you will save a lot of time, effort and money compared to manually creating and designing a tailored CRM for yourself. This ensures that you can continue with your day-to-day business functions as normal while letting the off-the-shelf software help you and your team keep track of customer journeys.
Bespoke CRM
On the other hand, bespoke CRM software has a distinct reason why it is effective for small, medium and large-sized businesses. See below for the features and benefits of a bespoke CRM that you can expect:
- Made specifically for your business
- Identifies current gaps and where you can improve your business processes
- Superior for your targeted marketing campaigns (increasing customer engagement)
- Always receive support from whoever built your CRM
- Makes multi-channel customer data management simple
- Can be modified depending on changes in products, seasonal promotions, etc
- Getting it made for you (requires no time and effort to curate yourself)
- An expert can explain how it is going to work for your business
Bespoke CRM is a tool that many businesses use when they want to hone in on making sure every business procedure is in line with what they want to achieve. Although this can be expensive with certain companies, this will create a huge ROI (return on investment) moving forward.
When Would Your Business Need a Bespoke CRM?
In relation to when your business would need a bespoke CRM, this could be at any part of your business journey. Bespoke CRMs have been shown to positively impact business operations and with them being custom-built for your industry - taking the leap and investing in a bespoke CRM will ensure that the customer acquisition and retention rate is at an all-time high.
Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, a custom-made CRM secures that integration, analytics, automation, growth, etc are all catered for - specifically for you!
We would recommend that if you’re looking to make CRM implementation a key part of your sales funnel, you speak with experts here at Fuelius and we’ll be more than happy to discuss how we can devise a plan for your personalised CRM.
We are in the top 1% of HubSpot agencies and have an elite partnership - meaning we have exclusive access to creating a cutting-edge CRM, designed to suit your business, no matter the industry. If you would like to discuss this further, book a discovery call today!
Illustrations of Bespoke CRM
A customised CRM can essentially be generated for any online business nowadays, in every sector. However, giving you examples of how this can be illustrated for different industries will give you a greater understanding of the thought process behind developing a bespoke CRM when looking to improve sales and marketing for your company:
- Sports and Hospitality - When booking appointments and making reservations within these niches, a bespoke CRM to structure your appointment setting will be a valuable asset to your establishment.
- E-commerce brands - As you have so many marketing channels to manage, a customised CRM allows you to manage all your leads and existing customers from each platform and create a customer journey that is smooth sailing across the board.
- Charities - When setting up fundraising campaigns for charities, you need a place to manage your donations, volunteer applications and much more. Bespoke CRM systems allow you to have a tailored structure behind approaching them in the best way possible.
- Gym Memberships - Whether this is your local boxing gym, martial arts club or traditional gym, tracking your email address and membership is important to ensure the business is running smoothly. Renewal updates, discounts, merchandise performance and customer service can all be things that a custom CRM can deal with.
- Business Administration/ Personal Assistant (PA) - When you’re logging typical information about the business, you’re often asked to record contracts, case management, reports and customer service duties. Whereas, if you had a bespoke CRM, you could spend more time focusing on the important duties of your job role.
Images: Envato Elements
