Custom CRM or off-the-shelf software: how to decide

Before comparing tools, start from your day-to-day work. A CRM is only worth something if people fill it in and use it. If it takes more time to update than it saves, your team will find ways around it within a few weeks and you will be back to the spreadsheet.

Write down the real situations where information is missing today: a customer calls back and nobody can find the last quote, a salesperson goes on holiday and their follow-ups stop, an enquiry from the website goes unanswered. Those are the situations the tool has to fix, wherever it comes from.

• Find a customer’s full history in one click: emails, quotes, orders, invoices.
• Know who needs to call whom back, and when.
• Track the quotes you have sent and those still awaiting a reply.
• Share information between the office, the workshop and the field.
• Get a simple view of activity without reworking an export by hand.

Let us be clear: in many small businesses, an off-the-shelf CRM does the job perfectly well. These products are proven, updated regularly, and you can start today. If your sales process looks like most companies’ (a contact, an opportunity, a quote, an order), there is a good chance a standard tool covers it.

The right move is to test before you decide. Take a free trial, enter your real customers and the quotes you have in progress, and have two or three people from your team work with it. A sales demo always shows the ideal case; your daily work shows the limits.

• The way you sell is fairly standard and you are willing to adjust a few habits.
• The built-in fields cover most of what you track.
• The integrations you need (email, accounting, calendar) already exist.
• The price per user stays reasonable for the size of your team.

Custom software is not about prestige. It becomes relevant when the standard tool forces you to work against it, every day. Three situations come up often.

The monthly price of off-the-shelf software often looks small next to a quote for custom development. To compare fairly, look at all the costs over several years, on both sides.

On the other hand, a custom tool costs more up front, then has ongoing hosting and maintenance costs. It is only worth it if it saves you time every day or replaces tools you no longer need.

• Subscriptions multiplied by the number of users, today and tomorrow.
• Paid add-ons and options you need for how you actually work.
• Time spent re-entering data, working around the tool or correcting it.
• Exit cost: can you export all your data in a readable format?
• For custom software: hosting, maintenance and future changes.

You do not need a long specification to see clearly. A few steps are enough to make an informed decision.

• List your real situations, as above, and rank them by importance.
• Test one or two off-the-shelf CRMs on those situations, with your real data.
• Note every workaround: a separate file, a field used for something else, data typed twice.
• If workarounds stay rare, choose the off-the-shelf tool and set it up properly.
• If they are frequent and daily, ask for a quote for custom software limited to the essentials.

We build custom CRMs and in-house business tools, quoted individually, from €2,500 excl. VAT. But if off-the-shelf software meets your needs, we will tell you during the free 30-minute first call. We would rather you have the right tool than a pointless project.

When custom software makes sense, we start with the core of what you need, then add features as you use it. Hosting is chosen with you, including in Europe, and you keep ownership of your data and your access.