Digitalising sales (your processes of acquiring and onboarding customers) can seem a huge and daunting task. The first step for many financial service providers is to go online and search for a few key solutions they know or at least have heard of and this can be a disaster and so we’ve created a quick guide to setting requirements and evaluating and selecting the right sales CRM for you.  

Most traditional sales CRM systems that everyone has heard of include Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics. These behemoths in the CRM solar system, are pioneers in CRM and other workplace SaaS services spanning analytics, customer service, marketing automation, and app development.

However these platforms are designed to manage and nurture corporate contacts and accounts for B2B sales and have huge implementation costs, operating costs and limitations for B2C organisations. The key reason is that these platforms were specifically built to serve only B2B businesses—and you can tell. B2B CRMs aim to help salespeople manage long, relatively predictable sales cycles and one-to-one communications, with tools to nurture leads across the course of a lengthy sales funnel.

Yet despite this, many B2C marketers still tried to force B2B CRMs to serve their very different business needs. When a product tailor-made for B2B sales clearly wasn’t doing the job, B2C CRMs emerged to fill the need for businesses that sell to individual consumers, rather than massive corporations.

The following table should help you determine what your needs are: 

Once you’ve decided whether you need a B2B or B2C platform then you can quickly determine what is affordable to your business at this stage of your process. Keys to those include:

1. Suitability - platforms designed for your industry, your sector and your business will reduce the cost and time of deployments.

2. Users - platforms with higher per user fees will be harder for businesses with large teams or less efficient sales teams in terms of revenue per agent. Monthly fees per range from US$15 to over US$200 so it is important to ensure that you quickly access the affordability of a solution to save you time in your selection process.

3. Support - Any deployment will require significant support from solution design to implementation so ensure the fees and scope of works are suitable and affordable.

With this checklist we hope you will have a better understanding of the high level requirements and selection criteria and if you have any questions or would like to speak to an ApplyOn solution manager speak to us today.