As the manufacturing landscape becomes more competitive, the need to both differentiate capabilities and promote capacity grows each year. More job shops are engaging in direct sales and marketing efforts that can help them secure more work.
Some of those efforts manifest in the form of individual contributors, or even whole teams, who are dedicated to promoting their shop and winning new business. But people are only one part of the equation; the other part is having the right systems in place to make sure your marketing and sales efforts are yielding the results you want.
For job shops who are looking to develop their own marketing and sales efforts, or improve the ones they already have in place, it’s essential to have the right CRM in place and optimized for how your shop does business.
CRMs have become standard additions to most businesses' tech stacks; although for some job shops, they’re still unexplored or under-utilized platforms. For the sake of level-setting, let’s define what a CRM is and why it’s important.
A CRM is a customer relationship management tool that helps businesses organize and manage their relationships in one single location that all customer-facing employees can easily access.
Businesses use CRM systems to keep track of leads, engage target accounts, manage deals, measure the performance of their sales efforts (and marketing efforts if they’ve selected a platform that can accomplish both), and ultimately win more business.
You can think of a CRM’s main functions as:
In the past, CRMs were not much more than glorified digital Rolodexes and hardly worth the effort it took to keep a business’s customer-related data up-to-date. Nowadays, CRMs are robust, AI-powered, and integration-friendly powerhouses.
When a business selects the right platform and customizes it appropriately for their unique needs, a CRM becomes an efficient, automated system to make your team work smarter and even more effectively.
That being said, let’s dig into the meat of this discussion: how do you choose the right CRM for your job shop?
While there are industry-leaders across the software landscape, and for good reason, there is no “perfect” or even best CRM. They all have their pros and cons, strengths and weaknesses.
And that’s fine; we’re not here to talk about the best or perfect CRM. We’re here to talk about how you can find the right CRM for your business.
To begin your search, bring together representatives from all customer-facing teams, the individuals who are spearheading any current marketing or sales efforts – the people who develop the strategies for customer engagement and execute them.
These are your CRM champions – the people who will use your CRM the most and be instrumental in ensuring your company achieves utilization once the optimal CRM platform has been chosen.
This group needs to review the list of criteria below and then determine which are the most important, which ones are the priorities. This list of criteria will help you eliminate any CRM options that are clearly not a good fit for your business; it will also guide you to determine a clear winner once you’ve whittled your contenders to 2 or 3 choices.
The best CRMs are the ones that go beyond customer data storage. They need to do something in order to justify their investment and propel your business forward.
CRMs offer a massive range of solutions and features, many of which overlap across different platforms or are unique to certain ones. It’s up to your team to identify the features and solutions they want to see in their CRM.
Is it just a sales tool, used to keep track of leads, accounts, deal pipelines, and sales forecasts?
Is it also a marketing tool, used to execute campaigns, automated workflows, lead nurturing activities, and email marketing?
Do you want it to serve as a CMS, a central location for your company’s website, landing pages, and lead generating forms?
Maybe you want your CRM to manage customer service activities, with a dedicated ticket pipeline, knowledge base, and customer portal?
The options aren’t limitless, but there sure are a lot. Do some research into CRM features and identify those that are most important and relevant to your team and your business processes.
In many cases, a CRM platform is available in “tiers,” giving you the option to add solutions and features as you need them. This is a great way to begin your CRM journey without breaking the budget, and to grow your CRM capabilities once you’ve seen a return on the initial investment.
Many manufacturers have invested in a CRM solution that is able to integrate with their quoting software, ERP, and accounting software (if it’s a separate solution from their ERP). This allows them to have a “closed loop” on customer-related data, encompassing from when they become a lead to when they become a repeat customer.
The Integrations criteria is fairly easy to address. Simply ask yourself these two questions:
If the answer to either of those questions is yes, prioritize CRM solutions that can either directly integrate with your other platforms, or have integration options like SQL tables or APIs.
Do your best to get out in front of any integration decisions. Once you’ve selected a CRM solution and started using it, as well as customizing it, switching to a new platform is a lengthy, often painful, process.
Of all the selection criteria, cost is typically the most important one, as well as the most limiting. If your team has an approved budget to work within, that alone will help you eliminate a number of platforms from your list of CRM options. Or maybe you need to present some options that your team is considering and present those options for approval.
In any case, there’s a balance to strike between the cheapest and most expensive options on the market. I’ve found that the saying “buy nice, or buy twice” has some value here. There’s no reason to break the bank on a CRM with features that far exceed your short-term or even long-term needs. It’s also wise to avoid cost-effective options that have limited features, data usage, and room for your company to grow into.
I offer this basic rule of thumb: the more your CRM “does”, the more expensive it will be. Decide what’s essential, what’s advantageous, and what’s optional altogether.
If you can find a solution that satisfies what’s essential and stays under budget, great. If you can find one that gets you what’s advantageous and you’re still under budget, even better.
Going back to the Functionality criteria, don’t forget about CRM packages that come in tiers. Not only does this apply to suites of tools (i.e., marketing, sales, customer service) but it also often applies to price breaks (i.e., Starter, Pro, Enterprise)
User-friendliness
Every software platform has a learning curve; there’s no avoiding it. But some are much steeper than others.
I remember in the early days of my first job shop marketing gig. The company had invested in Salesforce and it was one of the least intuitive systems I had encountered in my professional career. It wasn’t long before we switched to HubSpot, with the key driving factor behind that decision being how user-friendly it was.
In that vein, most job shops don’t have the budget or personnel to make highly complicated CRMs work for their teams. They need something intuitive, with a lot of out-of-the-box functionality, and the ability to customize the solution to the shop’s specific needs without someone on staff with a Bachelor’s in Data Management.
We’ve covered a lot of ground, and hopefully you’ve learned a lot about CRMs, utilization, software features, and selection criteria. Let’s put it all together.
Nothing you’ve read here is a hard and fast rule; my goal is to provide you with context and best practices to make the most informed decision possible so you can identify the right solution for your team and your business. Adapt this strategy, and shift these priorities, as it benefits you.
First, create a list of frontrunners, the CRM platforms that are most likely to meet your needs, by eliminating the platforms that will most definitely not meet those needs.
These are the CRMs that aren’t user-friendly, don’t have the features you need, won’t integrate with your current tech stack now or in the future, and fall outside of your budget.
Next, rank the CRMs you short-listed based on the selection criteria that you deem most important.
Some companies prioritize features; for others, it’s more important that the platform be user-friendly for both administrators and basic users. Or, the ability to integrate with their quoting software, ERPs and other platforms is the most critical factor at the end of the day.
Once you’ve whittled down your short-list, you may be left with one or two options. There are several ways to proceed as you come to a final decision.
Demo the product. Contact the company and request either a demo of the product. I prefer to do this later in the CRM search process so I can save time and avoid excessive meetings.
Try a Free version or a Free Trial. Many CRM solutions offer a free version, or a Free Trial of the paid version, of their software. This is a great way to get a feel for how the platform will perform and solicit feedback from the CRM users on your team.
All that’s left for your team to do is make a decision. Between research, defining your company’s unique selection criteria, creating a short-list of options, and demoing or trying a free version of the product, you’re ready to pick the right CRM for your team!
To review, here’s your checklist for choosing the best-fit CRM for your job shop:
The people at Spark’d love CRMs, so if you ever want to chat about them in more detail, or want help in choosing a platform that’s a strong fit for your team – drop us a line!