104. Choosing the Right CRM Solution: 4 Steps to Help You Make A Decision

Felicia Pugh: 00:00:00

Welcome to episode 104 of the Mom CEO Suite podcast.

Choosing the right CRM four steps to help you make a decision now having a CRM for your online business can be game changing in terms of how you interact with your clients and just the overall experience that they get when working with you. It also maximizes your time and helps you to stop doing things manually in your business.

But with all of the different options out on the market today, how do you really choose the best solution for your business? That's what we're digging into today.

I'm going to give you four simple steps that will help you make a decision in choosing the right CRM for your business. So stay tuned and enjoy the episode. Hey friend. Welcome to the Mom CEO Suite Podcast where faith, family and business come together.

I'm your host, Phylicia Pough, Christian wife, mom of two and life and business system strategist for mom entrepreneurs.

With over 10 years of experience working behind the scenes of businesses and ministries and as a work from home mompreneur, I'm here to share my personal journey and practical strategies to help you design systems that bring peace to your work and home life. While many strive for balance, I believe it's harmony, an integrated flow that works for you, that truly sustains.

Together we'll explore how to grow your service based business in a way that is sustainable and keeps your family family at the heart of it all. Plus hear real life stories and expertise from other mompreneurs who are walking the same path. Motherhood gets hard, entrepreneurship gets hard.

But together we can do hard things. Welcome to the suite. All right. Hey friend. Welcome to the episode. Thank you so much for being here.

Now if I sound a little bit stuffy, I am getting a slight cold. Both of my kids were sick this week and now I'm getting whatever it is that they had. So just bear with me.

Nonetheless, we are getting into this today how to choose the right CRM solution for your business. And I'm basically going to give you a few steps that's going to help you make a decision.

So if you're newer to business, if you're newer to the online space and you're not sure what a CRM is, it's a tool that you use to basically manage your client process. So CRM literally stands for Client relationship management. And I did a Separate episode, episode 68. I'll link it in the show notes.

It's called do you need a CRM for your online business? In that episode I really get into what a CRM is.

And I'll give you some insight into helping you determine if you need a CRM for your online business for the season that you're in right now. I'm not going to get too deep into that in this episode, so definitely go ahead, go back, listen to that past episode if you need that information.

So how does a CRM fit into your overall system? If you've been following me for any time, then you know that I define a system as your process plus your tools, plus your people, right?

When it comes to your client process, however, you manage that everywhere, from inquiry through unto offboarding, that's your process. And then the actual CRM tool supports that process.

And that's kind of going to be a theme that you'll hear throughout this episode, is you want to make sure that you have your process first before you consider any type of tool. But that's how it fits into the overall system. It's a support for your client management or your client experience process. Okay?

So when you are looking to find the perfect CRM or the right CRM for you, I'll say the right. Because I don't know if there is a perfect CRM.

In my experience, I found that while there are great options out there sometimes, at least for me personally, as great as the tool has been, there's always been something that I wish it could do. So I haven't found the perfect CRM, but I have found one that's a right solution for me for right now.

But when you think about finding that right CRM for you, think about when you are hiring a contractor or an employee in your business, right? This contractor or employee, they are handling tasks in your business. They need to be able to do certain things, right?

They need to have certain skills, they need to have certain personality traits or features that will fit into your business model. And so a CRM is essentially a tool that you are hiring to do work for you. So we shouldn't choose these haphazardly.

We really want to be intentional about how we are choosing the CRM the same way. Maybe not with as much stringency, I think that's the right word. But a CRM, you are hiring it to do something for you.

And so you, again, you want to be intentional. So that work is going to look different depending on the tool, but they are still going to be handling tasks.

The tool needs to be able to do certain things and it needs to have certain features.

So again, you should choose a CRM that's right for you and your business, not choosing One because someone, you know uses it, or choosing it because it's popular, or just haphazardly choosing one, you want to make sure that it's right for you and for your business.

And so I know personally, for me, as an online service provider where much of my work is done online, as a mompreneur or a mom in business, choosing the right CRM was crucial for me because I wanted to have a tool that's going to help me maximize my time so that I can focus on what matters most to me. And in that season, my priority is my family and my children.

And so having the right CRM that's able to take these tasks off of my plate and does it in a way that's seamless and it's beneficial to me, and it's not taking me too long to figure out how to make this thing work. It's really helping me to harmoniously integrate life and business. Right.

And so when you're thinking about this CRM, again, you don't want to waste too much time in a tool that you find out is not going to work for your business. So that's why picking the right tool from the jump will be beneficial.

Because in the end, if you find that, okay, this just does not work for me, you're either going to have to spend more time figuring out what actually does work, or you're going to have to spend more money to get it set up and settle in the correct CRM. Whether that's, you know, just the additional fee that you're going to incur with the newer CRM or hiring somebody to set it up for you.

Okay, so the goal of this episode today is to really help you choose the right CRM for your business. Now, I want to give a little disclaimer before I hop into my four steps.

I already kind of mentioned this, but you might not find a CRM that is able to check off all of your boxes. That's okay. But what. Which one is the best option for right now? In the last episode, I was talking about Dubsado versus Honeybook.

You know, I've been a longtime Dubsado user, but I had some frustrations with it. And so I started checking out another CRM platform.

And I found after digging through it, while it had some features that I liked and it handled one of the frustrations that I had with dubsadl overall, dubsadl still had better features for my preferences and for my needs.

So, again, find the best fit and the things that I'm sharing with you Today, again, it's just based on my experience and what I have found helpful in my own journey. Okay, so let's get into these four steps. How to choose the right CRM.

So, number one, this absolutely has to be number one is that you need to know your client process. Know your client process.

You want to find a CRM that supports your process, and you want to minimize the modification of your process to fit into a tool. So in order to avoid this, you have to know your process step by step.

And this does not have to be anything intricate, this does not have to be anything elaborate. But if somebody is going to inquire with your business, I usually stick with four categories or four larger phases for the client process.

Inquiry, onboarding, fulfillment, and offboarding. Okay, again, Inquiry, onboarding, fulfillment and offboarding. So if somebody is inquiring with your business, just basically, how do they do that?

How can someone inquire with you? Do they have to fill out a form and you qualify them through the form and then they get a scheduler to set up an appointment?

Or if somebody is inquiring with you, do they just skip a form and go straight to scheduling a consultation with you, or is all of your information just on your website and they can go and select the packages right there? Okay, so this is all going to be tailored to your business and how you operate your business.

For onboarding, you know, do they get a proposal, signed a contract, and then get a link to a questionnaire for more information that you need to gather. Right. What does that look like? So step by step, and you can start with pen and paper, use a whiteboard, whatever makes sense for you.

Just know what your process is step by step. Okay. And now this is something that I help clients with.

Through the Harmony System Sprint, I help you create an efficient client process from start to finish. Inquiry through offboarding.

And when we work together, the first step of that is a workflow work session where we are determining, step by step, how clients are going to go through your process. And you get all of the information in a workflow mapping spreadsheet where you're able to see what your process is written out.

So when you are ready to translate that into a CRM, you know exactly what the steps are and you know exactly all of the assets that you need. With the Harmony System Sprint, I actually help you set up the CRM.

But if you just sign up for a workflow work session, you still have that spreadsheet with all of the information. If you want more information about either the Harmony System Sprint or the workflow work session.

There's a link in the show description to give you more information. But that is the first step of the process.

That is the first step to help you make a decision in choosing the right CRM is to know your client process. Okay, step two is you want to decide on your desires and your non negotiables decide on your desires and non negotiables.

So think about this from the best case scenario. What is going to make your life the easiest? Okay, is it automation? Is it going to be something that's simple? Does it have to be easy to use?

Does it need to have a client portal? Does it need to have a mobile app? And so if a CRM does not have these desires or non negotiables, then it's going to be a no go for you.

Okay, so write down what the non negotiables are, what does the CRM absolutely need to have or what does it absolutely need to do? And this can be based on your preferences, your lifestyle, your again, your processes, challenges that you face in your business.

Okay, so I can't create this list for you. You have to go through and think about, okay, what is it that you really, really want in a CRM?

What do you want it to be able to do and if it doesn't have it, no go. I know a lot of people did not want to use Dubsado because it did not have a mobile app.

If you are on the go and you need to be able to constantly use your phone to be able to do things that might be a non negotiable for you. For me it didn't matter. I don't use the mobile app. So it's going to be different from person to person.

So that's number two, decide on your desires and non negotiables, write it out, write the list. Then number three, you want to compare features to functions. Okay, you are comparing the features of the CRM to the functions in your business.

So what is it that you actually do in your business?

Again, this is going back to knowing your client process and seeing, okay, does the CRM have features that actually support the things that I do in my business?

And then if you want to kind of have different categories where you can Compare features between CRMs so you can think about the user friendliness of the tool, you can think about the automation capabilities.

Again, if you know your process and you know how you want your clients to go through your process, then you're going to know how things should be automated through the CRM. From there, you can compare CRM to CRM to say, okay, this CRM does what I needed to do in terms of automation. This one does not.

You can also compare the features of customization. These are just some of the things, these are part of my list. These are some of the things that I look for.

Customization, am I able to customize things within the tool? You know, such as emails, such as the branding? And how easy is it to do that? The pricing. Right. You might be on a particular budget for your business.

And some CRMs, they can range anywhere from $20 a month all the way up to hundreds of dollars a month, depending on the CRM itself. And so you have to determine, okay, what's the budget that I want to stay in for this CRM. You can also look at customer support.

And this could be a big one if you maybe you're not super tech savvy or you're just new to the platform and you don't want to try to figure things out too much on your own. You want to look at the customer support, their chat, how responsive are they to their chats?

Do they have lots of tutorial videos that are easy to follow? Do they have a knowledge base that you can go and reference? So you definitely want to look at those things. Does the CRM have a community?

A community of people who.

Maybe it's in a Facebook group or some type of outside community where you can ask questions and get insight and just compare processes and how to do different things within the CRM. That's super helpful. And then you also want to look at scalability.

So can this CRM grow with me or is this just a CRM that I'm using for this season for where I am right now?

Now, neither way is right or wrong, but you have to decide if you want something that's going to scale with you, that's going to be able to grow with you, then you want to look at the scalability of the CRM. If that's not a feature that's important to you, then it doesn't really matter. Right? So that's number three.

Compare the features to the functions, the features of the CRM to the functions in your business. Okay. And see how that CRM is really going to support you through different things, like the user friendliness of it.

User friendliness, Again, user friendliness is important because you have to think about not only yourself, but also if you have a client portal and they are using it, how will they be able to navigate throughout the platform, if that is something that's important to you. Okay, so user friendliness, automation capabilities, customization, pricing, customer support, community scalability.

All right, and then finally, after you know what your client process is, after you have decided on your desires and your non negotiables, after you have compared features of the CRM to the functions in your business, then you want to actually test out these platforms. Okay?

Now a lot of times the CRMs, they have free trials that you can use, or if they don't have a free trial, you can get a demo for a certain amount of time. So for example, Honeybook, they have a seven day trial.

So you have seven days to kind of go into the platform to see what it can do, how you like it, how you maneuver and navigate through it, and if it makes sense for you. So again, you don't want to go in there blindly without knowing what it is that you're actually trying to do.

That's why again, going back to step number one, knowing your process is important. So Honeybook has the free seven day trial, Dubsado, they have the option where it's free up to three clients.

So after three, after three clients, then you have to pay for it. And then again, like I said, if there's no explicit free trial option, you might be able to reach out to the company and ask for a demo.

And if they don't have that, then I'm sure.

Well, not I'm sure, but there might be somebody in your community who has access to it who would be willing to kind of do a demo, a screen share for you. Okay, so just make sure you test it out to see what it can actually do.

Before you start paying for this tool, you want to make sure that it actually makes sense for you to integrate this into your system. And then you also want to ask around and ask existing users about their experience. Great places to do this are on threads and in Facebook groups.

So on threads. Actually, just recently someone was asking about Dubsado versus Honeybook and she mentioned Moxie.

Now Moxie is another CRM option, which I haven't spoken about it yet on the podcast, but there is a future episode scheduled where I'm talking about Moxie, so definitely stay tuned for that. But her comment about Moxie prompted me to really dig deeper into the platform.

And just depending on how your algorithm and your feed is set up, you will see conversations about things like business tools. And people constantly are talking about Dubsado versus Honeybook versus Moxie or, you know, what's the other one? Zoom versus Google.

Meet all of these different things.

So search threads for these different conversations and you'll be able to get some insight into how the platform operates and what you can do with it. And then also Facebook groups.

Every CRM or tool usually has a user Facebook group attached to it, or there just might be Facebook groups related to business tools and systems that you can go in and get insight from as well. So you just want to make sure you're testing these things out before you are actually committing to this CRM.

All right, so those are my four steps to help you make a decision on what CRM you should choose in your business. So number one, know your client process. If you don't take anything else away from this episode, this is it. Know what your client process is. Okay.

And if you need support with that, I'd be happy to chat with you about the workflow work session or the Harmony System Sprint. So know your client process. Number two, decide on your desires and your non negotiables.

Number three, compare the features of the CRM to the functions in your business. And then number four, test it out. Right?

Just the same way you would a car when you drive it or when you're buying a house, you go and you do a walkthrough, right? Do a walkthrough of the platform. Test drive the CRM. When you're hiring somebody, they usually come on for a trial period.

Take advantage of the trial periods. Okay? And so I hope that this is helpful to you.

Again, if you want more insight into if you really need a CRM for your online business, go back and Check out episode 68 of the podcast is linked in the show notes.

Um, but I have found that having a CRM has been super beneficial to me again as an online business owner and as a mom working from home with two littles home with me, it just handles so many things that I don't have to do manually, which is saving my time and also maximizing my time. But it's also allowing my clients to have a great experience working with me. Okay? So I hope that this was helpful. I would love to hear from you.

If you are already using a CRM, I would love to know what you are using and if you are shopping, if you're in the market for a new CRM, I would love to chat with you to see what type of features you are looking for. What are you really looking for in a CRM? So either way, shoot me a message over on Instagram. I love talking all things tools and tech.

Hit me up on Instagram. I would love to chat with you and I will see you in the next episode. Thank you for listening to the Mom CEO Suite Podcast.

If you enjoyed this episode Episode can you do us a favor? Leave a review on itunes and share with other moms in business like you.

Help us spread our message and empower others who are at this intersection of motherhood and entrepreneurship.