We provide the health clinics who are our customers with an enquiry management system in order to help them get the best from their patient enquiries, i.e. their customers. We are no different in that we also need a system to manage our customers.
Like a lot of new small companies we were familiar with different CRM solutions, but not enough to know which one would suit us best. We tried an expensive one, a cheap one, and in the end we built our own. Here’s our story.
What Did We Need From A CRM System?
The core functionality that we required included:
- Keeping track of tasks
- Keeping track of leads
- Making notes
- Managing a pipeline
Salesforce
We decided to implement Salesforce pretty early in the company’s life. Of all of the mainstream CRM systems out at the time it was the obvious, albeit expensive choice.
One of the common aspects of a traditional CRM system is that it attempts to model a typical sales process, i.e. Contacts, Leads & Opportunities. From a young company’s perspective this can seem very attractive as it gives your sales process some shape where perhaps there was none before, as was the case with our own. This idea of structuring your sales process is seductive and it gives the illusion of control.
The problem is that the structure acts as a natural restraint to change. As you move your company forward, you often need to make rapid fire decisions and changes to your initial assumptions. However the structured sales process resists these changes. This is not a good thing. In my opinion traditional CRM systems are best suited to mature companies that have very specific requirements which are very unlikely to change.
The downsides of Salesforce in our experience were:
- It is very expensive
- Its feature set is strongly geared towards licensing
- It can be very slow
- It is extremely complex. It can take days to become competent with certain aspects of the software.
Integration Issues
For us one of the major problems we had with Salesforce was the nature of our own business. RevaHealth.com is a directory of health clinics and our live database contains all of the relevant information about each of our customers. Salesforce became a new database that had to replicate a lot of the same information.
We worked very hard to push all the changes made in the Revahealth.com database out to Salesforce as they happened in an attempt to keep the two synchronised. Needless to say this resulted in numerous problems including:
- Changes made to Salesforce were not pushed to Revahealth.com. This was not an immediate problem but over time the problem grew.
- Salesforce couldn’t hope to deal with the scope and flux of the specific information that Revahealth.com handled and this lead to account managers being forced to work with two systems – Salesforce & RevaHealth.com.
- As with all interconnected systems, service failures happen and the effort required to monitor and to fix these failures was greater than expected.
- Once every couple of months we would decide to push the entire RevaHealth.com database into Salesforce to refresh it and every time we ran into licensing issues.
Eventually the SalesForce database and the RevaHealth.com database diverged to such an extent that the sales team no longer trusted it. And that was the end of it. After a year of effort and about 6 man months of integration, maintenance and support we reverted to pens, notepads and Excel.
This wasn’t as bad as it sounds. Even though we had tens of thousands of free accounts to work with we only had around 200 paying customers. In retrospect it is easy for us to say that there is no way we should have even been looking at a full scale CRM system with that number of paying customers.
Highrise
Towards the middle of 2009 one of our sales staff, Owen Cooney, started looking at other systems and experimented with Highrise from 37 Signals. This made a lot of sense to us as we were already using their Basecamp product for our project management. After a month of evaluation we officially adopted it and were very happy that it answered a lot of the shortcomings of SalesForce:
- It was quick.
- It was simple, although excessively so.
- It did not have the licensing issues of Salesforce.
Having learnt from our previous mistakes about database synchronisation we decided that the Highrise system would only be used for new customers and not for account management. This meant that we avoided any integration issues. It worked for a while and was especially effective at task management. However its inability to deal with existing customers and any form of pipeline management meant that our sales team consistently had to use three different web applications:
- Highrise for new customers
- The RevaHealth.com account administration tool for existing customers
- A home-grown pipeline management tool
Of these the single biggest issue for us was pipeline management. As the number of deals that we were creating increased we found that an inordinate amount of management time had to be spent at the end of every month reconciling the sales recorded in Highrise, those in the pipeline tool and the actual invoices generated by the RevaHealth.com administration tool. Invariably there would be substantial discrepancies. This meant that we couldn’t trust either Highrise or the pipeline tool for management purposes.
So What Did We Do?
In the end there was only one answer that made any sense. We built our own CRM system. From the mistakes of the past we now had a very clear set of requirements, and we avoided any sort of replication, duplication, integration and reconciliation issues by building it on top of our existing database.
It took us about 3 man weeks using one of our developers to get it up and running. We’re not the best designers (graphically speaking) in the world but it didn’t need to be pretty as it was only going to be used by our own sales staff. Much more important was that it had to be fast, which thankfully it is.
Seeing as it looks directly at the source data the pipeline report looks at actual invoices not at our sales team’s interpretation of the invoices. It also has a nice and simple task management tool built in to it, and there is no need for two systems for new customers and existing customers.
Building Your Own CRM System Might Not Be Right For You
It’s now more than two years since we first started down the road of using CRM systems. If we had tried to build one ourselves at the very beginning we’d probably just have another horror story to add to our experiences with Salesforce and Highrise, but now was the right time for us to build our own. We had a clear set of requirements and had all the information we needed in one source, our own database.
For you things might be different. Hopefully by reading about some of the mistakes we made you might identify some issues you could run into. Feel free to ask us about our experiences in the comments below, and share your own CRM success or horror stories too.
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