CRM and sales

What sits on this shelf

A CRM keeps the record of who you are selling to and how far that conversation has got. What vendors build around that core differs wildly: quoting, marketing email, a dialler with call recording, sometimes light delivery work once the deal is signed.

Two products can both call themselves a CRM and feel like different categories the moment you open them.

The listings here run from contact managers a solo founder uses instead of a spreadsheet, up to platforms a twenty-person revenue team sits inside all day. Tools built mainly for cold outbound belong in sales engagement, tools built mainly for campaigns in email marketing.

The data model decides everything else

Before features, look at what the product thinks the world is made of.

Some CRMs are company-first: the account is the record, people hang off it, deals hang off the account. Others are people-first, which suits agencies and consultants selling to individuals who change employers. A third group is deal-first and treats everything else as an attribute of the opportunity.

Choose wrong and you spend years adding custom fields to paper over the mismatch.

Sketch the real sales motion before the demo. Who is the buyer, who signs, who else has to agree, what happens when your contact leaves the company. Multi-touch selling is the usual breaking point: if three people at one company each start a separate conversation with you, ask how the product handles that without three duplicate records.

What automation covers, and what it costs

Every vendor sells automation. The word covers at least four separate things:

• Routing hands a new lead to an owner by territory, company size or round robin.
• Sequences send a planned series of messages and stop when someone replies.
• Field logic moves stages, dates and owners when a condition is met.
• Scoring ranks records by fit or recent activity so a rep works from the top.

Almost none of it appears on the entry plan, and the entry plan is what the pricing table invites you to compare. Find which tier holds the piece you actually need before comparing monthly figures at all.

Then count seats honestly. A manager who only reads reports, a finance person checking a closed deal, a founder who looks once a week: some vendors charge those people full price, some sell a cheaper viewer seat, some let them in free.

How pricing works in this category

Per user per month is the norm, billed annually to reach the number on the advertisement. Paying monthly usually costs about a fifth more.

Watch for a seat minimum. Plenty of mid-tier plans quietly require three or five users, which turns an eighteen-dollar price into a ninety-dollar invoice for a team of two.

Past seats, the meters that catch people out are email sends, stored records, custom fields, workflow runs and API calls. Ask for the number attached to your plan rather than the adjective on the page. Our note on what pricing pages hide covers the rest of the tricks.

Onboarding fees show up at the top of the market. If a quote bundles implementation, ask what the renewal looks like once that work is done.

Getting your data in, and out again

Two questions decide whether a CRM is a tool or a trap.

Can you import what you already have with notes, owners and history attached, rather than a flat list of names? And can you take the same thing out later in a format another product can read?

Test the export during the trial, not at renewal. A vendor that exports contacts but leaves the activity behind is holding the part that took three years to build.

Integrations deserve the same suspicion. Check the ones you touch daily: mailbox and calendar sync in both directions, the invoicing tool, the support inbox, whatever holds product usage data.

Where teams get this wrong

The common mistake is buying for the org chart you hope to have in three years. A fifteen-seat platform bought by four people gets used like a spreadsheet with worse ergonomics, and everyone quietly builds workarounds.

The other one is adopting a tool nobody enters data into. Adoption follows effort. If logging a call takes six clicks, calls stop being logged, and every report built on that data starts lying.

Run one real deal end to end during the trial, including the ugly parts. A duplicate contact. A deal that changes owner halfway. A company with two buying units that do not talk to each other. Whatever the tool does badly will surface in that hour.