CRM for a Medium-Sized Business. What Should It Be Like?

What you have in mind when purchasing CRM is usually the basic monthly rate you agreed to. However, many users forget that it's not all about the cost. Equally important is the selection of features that are truly needed and user experience. Otherwise, an overly complex system starts generating additional support costs, and employees may become discouraged from using CRM. How to avoid this, find a golden mean, and choose a package that meets the needs of your business?

Medium-Sized Businesses and CRM

You turn to software for medium-sized businesses when the limitations of free versions and basic packages become so severe that they hinder satisfying sales support. Medium-sized businesses need more advanced features in various areas, but they don't require a CRM built for Fortune500 companies. Maintaining this balance is crucial if you don't want to break the budget or spend half a year or more implementing CRM.

Features, prices, configuration, and deployment for medium-sized companies differ from those set for both smaller and larger enterprises. In the case of CRM for medium-sized businesses, we talk about companies where more than 10 users will use CRM, and at least some of them will need functionality beyond basic.

However, they won't need huge sets of features, support, and customization offered by enterprise-class packages designed for the largest companies with multiple sales teams in different locations. Of course, you may be tempted to invest more than less. However, this is rarely a profitable move – paying for features you simply won't use.

HubSpot's pricing clearly shows the levels of specific functionalities. Moreover, if you need to increase the limits of a specific feature, you don't have to immediately invest an additional thousand euros in the Enterprise package – you can add only the extensions you need for a small fee, such as additional minutes for phone calls from the CRM.

What does a medium-sized business expect from CRM?

If you are interested in taking full control of the sales process, optimizing your representatives' actions, and maximizing your team's revenue, CRM for medium-sized businesses is probably for you. If you want to increase efficiency through sales and marketing automation, gain quick insights into data and analyses, improve customer service response time – CRM is a solution worth considering.

Medium-sized companies primarily exploit CRM in the context of three crucial areas:

1. Marketing: CRM enables marketing automation to increase team efficiency, allows defining purchase paths to nurture leads, offers support for lead generation processes through tailored tools from email marketing, landing pages, forms, and more.
   
   
2. Sales: CRM is a new quality of resource, contact, and lead management; it enables the connection of marketing and sales funnels, creation of sales sequences, automatic notifications, automation in contact data completion, and, most importantly, gathering all customer information in one database.
   
   
3. Customer service: customer experience has invaluable importance for company revenue, so it's worth using CRM to support customer service management, assigning tickets, allowing the team to conduct appropriate conversations with knowledge about the customer's history.

For a medium-sized company, CRM allows:

• Organizing teams around one source of information.
• Eliminating communication bottlenecks and delays in information transfer.
• Improving collaboration between sales and marketing.
• Closing deals faster.
• Eliminating tasks that waste time.
• Speeding up customer service and improving its quality.
  
  

Functions and Features of CRM for a Medium-Sized Business

With a well-chosen CRM, you can gain the power you need at a low total cost of ownership and a short implementation time. However, to achieve this, you must spend time making a skillful choice of a specific solution.

CRMs are usually classified as solutions for SMBs or enterprise-class solutions. However, the needs of a medium-sized organization already differ significantly from the needs of micro-companies. As the team grows, it's worth investing in tools that facilitate collaboration and automate task delegation.

Here are some features to consider for a medium-sized enterprise:

• Team collaboration – a good CRM supports not only marketing and sales collaboration but also all stakeholders in the company. Check if you will have the option to provide free access to data, for example, to the person responsible for finance or HR, or if it will involve an additional cost. Find out who in the company can benefit from CRM.
  
  
• Access management – make sure your CRM will have access management options. Not all employees in the organization should have access to all data; you should have the ability to adjust appropriately.
  
  
• Automations – in a growing organization, routine tasks increase, and their improvement through automation becomes crucial. What data will enter the system without additional rewriting? What actions (e.g., sending messages) can happen after a specific trigger? What will the system notify employees about?
  
  
• Team management – in teams larger than one person, tools for managing, task allocation, or ticket control become useful – these are capabilities your CRM should provide.
  
  
• Reporting and analytics – as the company grows, there is more data, at this stage, pay special attention to reporting and analysis tools to make decisions based on reliable information.

In addition to features, the platform's characteristics are also essential, ensuring that your employees quickly and efficiently start using it. In the case of a medium-sized company, you can't afford to hire a separate employee solely responsible for CRM system management. It would also be optimal to limit the need for assistance from IT support or external specialists. Therefore, find out if the CRM you are considering is:

1. Intuitive to use – this will reduce the number of queries and requests for support, and above all, increase the comfort of employees and make them want to use the new system instead of getting irritated.
   
   
2. Quick to implement – tools should serve you, not the other way around. CRM, like any new solution, will require training for employees, but the entire implementation should not cost you excessively much time.
   
   
3. Easy to customize – the ability to create personalized views or non-standard contact features without coding is a big plus.
   
   
4. Scalable – you certainly want your company to grow, so it's worth choosing a tool that is not only a choice for small organizations but also allows for a smooth transition to more complex solutions.

These are not all the important criteria; some of the remaining ones are described in the article "What to look for when choosing CRM?". Much depends on the specific nature of your business, such as whether you sell to individual or business customers. E-commerce will require different functionalities than a business largely based on personalized B2B services. The budget remains crucial.

If you want to find out what CRM can change in the way you run your business, take a closer look at key functionalities from your business perspective, use the free HubSpot demo. Pre-purchase software consultations can significantly help in choosing the optimal solution that supports your business without ruining your budget.