A well-chosen, well-configured CRM changes the way a company sells, follows up with customers and makes decisions. A poorly chosen one becomes yet another tool nobody fills in. This guide walks through the questions to ask and the features to look at, step by step, using EspoCRM — the solution we use and recommend — as an example.
1. What is customer relationship management?
Customer relationship management (CRM) is an approach to organizing a company’s interactions with its current and potential customers. It relies on analyzing each customer’s history to improve the relationship, with two main goals: keeping customers and growing sales.
A CRM system brings together data from every communication channel: website, phone, email, live chat, marketing materials and social media. The company gets to know its target audiences better and learns how to meet their needs.
2. The right questions before choosing
The market offers countless CRM solutions, at every price point and with every kind of feature. Before comparing offers, you need to know what you are looking for.
Define your needs
Defining your needs does not mean listing every feature you can think of. Your business is unique in its processes, customer base and growth dynamics. Settling for a rigid set of standard functions is not wise: you need a scalable solution that will grow with you.
At the same time, CRM software often comes packed with features designed to appeal to everyone. Why pay for what you don’t need? Not everyone in the company needs everything: your sales team will want advanced sales tools, your communications team only the marketing features. Stay away from one-size-fits-all solutions and choose a CRM that adapts to you.
Set your goals
- Know your customers better
- Increase their satisfaction
- Make your sales team more efficient
- Anticipate your prospects’ and customers’ needs
- Save time for every department involved
- Connect sales and marketing activities
- Sell better
Without clear goals, you cannot tell whether they have been reached, or whether your CRM is working.
3. The main CRM objects
A CRM is built around “objects” (or entities), some available by default, others optional. Here are the main ones in EspoCRM.
Sales and marketing
Leads. A lead is a person or organization that is not a customer yet but could become one. Creating a lead is usually the first step of the sales process. Leads can be created manually, through the API (for example from a web form) or automatically by a workflow rule. Workflows can also distribute new leads among salespeople automatically, for example in turn (round-robin) or to whoever is least busy. For more complex processes, EspoCRM includes a BPM tool.
Conversion. A Convert button turns a lead into an account, a contact and/or an opportunity. The lead is not deleted: its status changes to Converted and it keeps links to the new records. A contact can be related to several accounts, with a specific role in each.
Opportunities. An opportunity is a potential or closed deal. The default stages run from Prospecting through Qualification, Proposal and Negotiation to Closed Won or Closed Lost, and the administrator can adapt them. Each stage carries a probability of success used for revenue forecasting; only won opportunities count toward sales revenue.
Products, quotes, sales orders and invoices. Products, organized in a tree of categories, have three prices (cost, list and unit), and the unit price can be calculated automatically according to the pricing type. A quote can be created from an opportunity, then converted into a sales order and an invoice. All these documents can be printed to PDF using custom templates, with your own design and fields.
Customer support
Cases (tickets). Cases track support requests. They can be created by your staff, by customers through a portal, through the API, automatically when an email reaches a given mailbox, or by a workflow rule. Workflows can notify the right people and assign new cases automatically.
Stream. Each case has a conversation thread between the customer and your team. Internal posts, marked with a lock, stay hidden from the customer.
Email-to-case, knowledge base and customer portal. A group mailbox can create a case for every incoming message. Your team can link knowledge base articles to a case, and customers can open and follow their requests in a dedicated portal, getting a notification for each new message.
4. User experience is a deciding factor
One of the most important criteria when choosing a CRM is the day-to-day experience: does the tool help you? Is it intuitive? Does anything slow you down?
During a demo, ask how many clicks a common task takes, and watch closely: are the buttons clearly labeled? Does the flow of actions make sense? Surveys run by CRM vendors agree: ease of use is one of the top selection criteria and the main driver of adoption by teams.
The reason is simple. A CRM is only as good as the information it holds. If data entry is painful, the data will be incomplete — and a poorly filled CRM only produces unreliable results. Garbage in, garbage out.
5. Integration with your other tools
You are not buying a CRM to add yet another system to your collection, but to streamline your operations. It must integrate with the applications you already use — not just Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, but also your ERP or accounting software, your HR software, your website and its forms (to create leads), your billing and e-commerce platforms, and your marketing tools.
6. Email in your CRM
Individual emails
EspoCRM connects with Outlook or Gmail, but it also has its own email system. It fetches messages from your IMAP mailboxes in the background at regular intervals and can be used as an email client with CRM-specific features:
- Each incoming email is automatically linked to the right record (account, lead, opportunity, case…), or can be linked manually.
- An email from a new potential customer can be converted into a lead, a task or a case.
- Unknown addresses can become contacts in one click.
- All exchanges appear in the history of the related record, and also show up in the linked account.
- Email templates with dynamic fields (for example
{Account.name}) work for both individual and mass emails.
Note: deleting an email removes it from the system entirely. It is better to use Move to Trash, and the administrator can withhold delete rights from users.
Mass emails and campaigns
- Create a target list, manually, from a search filter or with a report.
- Create an Email or Newsletter campaign and assign one or more target lists to it, plus any excluding lists.
- Create the mass email: start date and email template. Messages then go out in batches, at a rate the administrator can adjust.
An opt-out link is added automatically (and can be customized), and tracking URLs show who clicked. The campaign log shows emails sent, opened and bounced, opt-outs and clicks. You can even build a new target list from this log — for example, only the contacts who clicked.
Finally, EspoCRM can run on your own server, so you won’t end up on a blacklist because of the behavior of other companies sharing the same sending service.
7. Configuration, data and training
A CRM that is poorly configured, or that your team doesn’t know how to use, is of no use. When you ask for a price, also ask what configuration and tailored training will cost — not just online tutorials. The CRM must reflect your sales process, marketing strategy, customer service and contact management: choose a system that is easy to configure.
A successful rollout usually follows four steps:
- Configuration: adapt companies, contacts, activities and templates to the processes defined during the analysis of your needs.
- Data import: put the right information in the right place, so that all your customer data lives in one place.
- Training: train users on the core features and administrators on managing the system — in groups, individually or by role. Training also shows how each person contributes to the whole team’s work.
- Support: answer the inevitable questions of the first weeks with a new tool, to ensure a smooth start.
8. Personal data protection
More and more countries regulate data protection: the GDPR in Europe, PIPEDA in Canada, Law 25 in Quebec, and a patchwork of laws in the United States. Knowing what data you hold about your customers, and where it is stored, matters more than ever.
A well-configured CRM helps you respond efficiently. If a customer asks to be removed from your records, you must be able to delete their data and confirm the deletion. If they ask for a report of everything you hold about them, you must be able to produce it. Doing this by hand across several databases (sales, marketing, support) takes time and too often leads to errors; with a centralized CRM, it takes a few clicks. And hosting EspoCRM on your own server means you know exactly where your data lives.
Fluids & C° is compliant with the GDPR and Quebec’s Law 25.
How Fluids & C° can help
We use EspoCRM ourselves every day, including for our emails and campaigns. We can help you at every step: defining your needs and goals, choosing objects and their options, adapting the interface to the way you work, setting up your emails and campaigns, importing your data, and training and supporting your team.
To learn more about the solution, see our EspoCRM page. Contact us for any information or a quote.