{"id":6506,"date":"2015-10-09T11:06:51","date_gmt":"2015-10-09T18:06:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rivaliq.com\/blog\/?p=6506"},"modified":"2017-04-12T20:26:36","modified_gmt":"2017-04-12T20:26:36","slug":"choose-a-crm-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rivaliq.com\/blog\/choose-a-crm-system\/","title":{"rendered":"How We Chose a CRM System in 30 Days"},"content":{"rendered":"

tl;dr<\/strong> Recently, we went through a 4-week evaluation process for a new CRM system. After some basic research, we did full evaluations of SalesforceIQ, Hubspot, and Close.io. For us, the winner was Close.io because of their email and call integration.<\/em><\/p>\n

It Was Time for a Change<\/h2>\n

\"From<\/a>We recently concluded a 4-week evaluation process for a new Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. It was a time consuming process, so this article is our way of paying it forward.<\/p>\n

Before starting our search, we were Streak<\/a> customers for about 15 months. Though Streak has continued to grow their product offering, we felt we had outgrown them for two main\u00a0reasons.<\/p>\n

First, the lack of complete email syncing (inbound and outbound) and calling integration were key drivers for our move.<\/p>\n

Second,\u00a0we were frustrated with their app performance bogging down our Gmail interface.<\/p>\n

Since we were gearing up to grow our sales team, the time felt\u00a0right to upgrade our system.<\/p>\n \n \n

Our Primary Goal: Find a CRM System in 30 Days<\/h2>\n

\"30<\/a><\/p>\n

Going into this project, we established a few primary goals to help us quickly filter our list of potential CRM system candidates to a short list of three.<\/p>\n

Our primary goals for the selection process were:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Begin integration work\u00a0within 1 month of starting the project<\/li>\n
  2. Choose a CRM system whose rollout could be done with our current staff within a 2-week timeframe.<\/li>\n
  3. Satisfy all of our must-have criteria (more on this later).<\/li>\n
  4. Choose a SaaS solution.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    A secondary goal of the buying process was to compare and contrast our sales processes with those of the vendors we were evaluating. We recently read a post about using product evaluations to up your sales game<\/span><\/a> from one of our investors, Ari Newman. Since the timing worked out, it felt like a great time to try out the experiment. Who better to test than sales professionals selling sales software (say that three times fast)?<\/span><\/p>\n \n \n

    Calling and Email Integration Were\u00a0Our Top\u00a0Criteria<\/h2>\n

    As we started down the road of choosing a new CRM system, the first thing we settled\u00a0was our requirements. While we were mostly aligned on the primary requirements, choosing\u00a0the relative weighting of each feature was a longer process that unfolded during our evaluation.<\/p>\n

    Each internal\u00a0stakeholder had widely differing ideas about which of the requirements were must-haves versus nice-to-haves and even how to stack rank them.\u00a0To get closer to an answer, we sat down with our account executives to understand the gaps and friction in their current workflow.<\/p>\n

    We rounded out the criteria list with our requirements for reporting and process. Then, we got into a room and settled things cage-match style. (I\u2019m just checking to see that you\u2019re still reading.)<\/p>\n \n \n

    Here is a run-through of the main criteria that we considered in choosing our CRM system.\"Requirements<\/p>\n

    Complete, Automatic Email Sync, Both Inbound and Outbound<\/h3>\n

    For our business, email is an important part of our customer communications. Though we use Gmail as an email backend, our team\u00a0uses a variety of clients to send and read email. Our strong desire was to find a CRM system that could work against the Gmail service directly as opposed to requiring a client-side solution such as a browser extension.<\/p>\n

    Automatic Call Logging<\/h3>\n

    Our reporting and measurement is only as good as the data we put into the process. We were looking to find a CRM system that would automatically log all calls made and received with as much detail as possible.<\/p>\n

    Automatic Call Recording<\/h3>\n

    An important part of sales training is being able to review the calls of our account executives. We wanted a solution that would\u00a0record calls without any action from the account executive.<\/p>\n

    API<\/h3>\n

    Automating the transfer of information between our CRM system and our other systems was very important to all of us. Our marketing site is the main source of signup and lead information, and our product provides valuable customer activity and engagement data. We use Intercom<\/a>\u00a0as our primary customer support tool, so integrating information about support and success activity needed to happen as well.<\/p>\n

    Calling Flexibility<\/h3>\n

    We know that our account executives won’t make every call from their desktop. We were looking for a system that had calling flexibility – meaning the ability to call on a traditional phone in addition to the VOIP solution provided by the CRM.<\/p>\n

    Minimal Setup<\/h3>\n

    As we are relatively early in the development of our sales processes, we weren\u2019t looking to make a large, upfront investment in the provisioning or configuration of a CRM system.<\/p>\n

    Task Management<\/h3>\n

    As we became more familiar with the three tools we were evaluating, we added task management as a requirement. Specifically, we were looking for a tool that could do some automatic task creation in response to lead behavior (or lack thereof).<\/p>\n

    Also, we wanted a tool that could provide a single view of important, incomplete sales activities for our account executives. While our team is good at staying on top of the details, no one is perfect. It is certainly better to have technology on your side when you can.<\/p>\n

    Information Architecture<\/h3>\n

    Our most straightforward sale is one where we interact with a single person at an organization. In this case, the lead is the only point of contact, and things are simple. However, in more cases, we deal with multiple contacts and trial users of our product from a single company. We wanted a CRM that could handle this use case as well.<\/p>\n

    HubSpot and Close.io and SalesforceIQ, Oh My!<\/h2>\n

    \"SalesforceIQ,<\/p>\n

    We created a set of potential CRM candidates by leveraging the resources we had available to us: our past experience in exploring marketing automation systems, polling our friends, asking our investors, Googling, etc.<\/p>\n

    To narrow the list, we used online product documentation to do a high-level comparison of our requirements against the capabilities of each product. In the case of HubSpot and Salesforce, we also worked with a sales representative to dig deeper before committing to a trial.<\/p>\n \n \n

    Our goal was to evaluate three systems as a part of our process. Three felt like the right number to give us the perspective we needed without being overly cumbersome. Looking back, this continues to feel like a good decision.<\/p>\n

    In the end, the three systems we chose to evaluate were:<\/p>\n