The Ultimate Guide to

Choosing a Free CRM

Table of Contents
Part 3
Part 1
FIT
CRM
Functionality
What is a CRM Ease of Use
What is a Social CRM Customization
Major Benefits of CRM Integrations
Scalability
Part 2 Security
Community
Support
FREE Licensing
Costs
What is FREE
Freemium vs Open Source
Part 1

CRM
What is a CRM
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management.

CRM is in fact a combination of strategy and technology to build

and improve business relationships with customers. The CRM
system goals are threefold- to acquire and nurture leads,
increase sales conversion, and improve customer satisfaction
and retention.

CRM software on the other hand is a software tool that is used in

businesses to enable the following functions:

Contact Management

Pipeline Management

Marketing Campaigns

Customer Service

“CRM is a philosophy and a business strategy supported by a

system and a technology designed to improve human interactions
in a business environment”, Paul Greenberg, CRM Guru
 What is a Social CRM

“
“Social CRM is a philosophy & a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business
rules, workflow, processes & social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative
conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted & transparent business
environment.

It’s the company’s programmatic response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation."
Paul Greenberg
“

“It’s now a two-way conversation. Listen, respond and talk intelligently. Stop
dictating to customers. It’s your customers, not you, who have the power"
“
George Colony
Former CEO, Forrester Research

Customers are now more aware than ever before. They expect you to respond to them at the touchpoints and channels where they are in, not
force them to interact in channels that you have control over. It doesn’t matter if your CRM is free or costs you millions of dollars, it should serve
your business goals. In today’s ultra-competitive business environment, if your CRM doesn’t empower you to listen and respond to customers you
are wasting your time and money.
Major Benefits of CRM
Centralizes Data Management

A CRM helps to keep all customer data in a single location. This

makes it easy for all teams to be on the same page with one view of
the customer that can be updated, securely in real time.

Saves Time for Sales Teams

Modern CRMs let sales team update customer data from multiple
access points when they need to. Additionally, routine tasks can be
automated so sales teams can focus on closing deals rather than
wasting time updating data.

Improves Sales Forecasting

CRM systems use historical data trends and up to date customer

information to better forecast the sales funnel. This empowers sales
managers to improve their planning and run required interventions
well in advance, to meet business goals.

Boosts Customer Retention

Since CRM technology is now advanced enough, it can look for

signals in interactions to detect service issues. Through deep
personalization and advanced analytics, businesses can
substantially improve their customer satisfaction and retention.
Part 2

FREE
“
“ “Free is both a familiar concept and a deeply mysterious one.
It is as powerful as it is misunderstood"

Anderson C.
FREE: The future of a radical price
 What is FREE?
The word FREE is often misunderstood and open to multiple
interpretations. In the world of software, a distinction is often made
based on the notions of gratis and libre.

Gratis: The concept of free as gratis relates to the cost of software.

When some software or application is made available gratis, it means
there is no monetary cost for the software itself. There might be other
costs.

Libre: The concept of free as in libre is much more expansive and

relates to the notion of freedom and liberty. That is those who use the
software are not controlled by any obligation and have freedom to
modify and distribute without interference by the developers.

Cloud applications often give users the option to access a free version
of their software. This is a no commitment entry option for people to try
out if the application works for them before committing to a paid
version. This is software being offered gratis. “Free as in Beer” - you
can’t decide which brew it is, but you can consume it without anything
being expected in return.

Open-Source software which gives users the freedom to modify and

distribute source code, is the software being give free as in libre. Often
referred to as “Free as in Speech”.
 Freemium Cloud CRM
Pros
• Zero license cost for FREE editions, scales easily
• Reduces responsibilities for IT team
• Eliminates Capital Expenses
• Regular Automatic Data Backups
• Secure and updates with latest patches
• Supports BYOD policies
Cons
• User experience limited by internet access
• No flexibility to change core code
• Limited influence over future capabilities upgrades
• Data localization requirements may not be
supported
Open-Source CRM
Pros
• Totally Free to download
• Complete freedom to modify code as required
• Critical data remains in-house
• Total control over code-base
• Easy to build complex custom integrations
Cons
• Data security and storage must be handled
• Need substantial IT skills to setup and administer
• Access mechanisms are limited
• Needs capital investment in infrastructure
• Capability upgrades by community may not align
with priority of any one user
Part 3

FIT
Evaluate Software Fit
When considering which version of Free CRM works best for you, it
makes sense to take a moment and map out how well the
application really works for your specific business needs.

These are some of the parameters you should evaluate before

going ahead with a software solution

Functionality Security

Ease of Use Community

Customization Support

Integrations Licensing

Scalability Costs
 Functionality
When evaluating a CRM for your use, look for support for the core
functionalities you need today and maybe a year into the future.

If you are a two person start-up with a core need for basic sales funnel
functionalities like contact management, deal tracking and email
marketing, it does not make sense to get a CRM that gives you
hundreds of bells and whistles for ‘free’. In addition to the fact that you
will not use any of those features, chances are you will still need to
spend time (and possibly money) to figure out how things work.

Alternatively if you are a large company with distributed sales teams

and mature process flows, you need a CRM that can support these
out-of-the-box as far as possible.

If you need to keep some of your customer data in another application,

then the CRM is not really serving its purpose.

In addition to evaluating current capabilities that you need, check out

how easy it is to add-on or activate additional capabilities that you
think you will need in about an year’s time. Getting your team familiar
with mission critical software like a CRM takes time. If you find that you
will outgrow your software capabilities within months, then your team
will always be playing catch-up and will take that much longer to
realize the potential of using a CRM.
 Ease of Use
Just because the CRM software is free does not mean that it is simple
or intuitive.

Dealing with overly complex software with user flows that are not easy
to understand comes with a lot of hidden costs. You might be getting
the software for free, but you might end up paying dearly in terms of
overheads and productivity costs.

Evaluate the complexity of set up and administration. A freemium

cloud edition will largely have much lower requirements of time and
effort in terms of getting the application up and running compared to
an open-source on-premise or personal-cloud installation.

The next thing to evaluate is the user interface. If your sales and
support teams need hours of training to get used to the CRM, those
costs add up quickly.

A good CRM should reduce the data entry time for users and add to
process efficiency, not become yet another challenge that needs to be
dealt with.
 Customization
It is rare to find a CRM that has every single feature you need
configured precisely the way your business processes are set up. There
is always a degree of customization that will be needed. The degree of
this customization will depend on the maturity and complexity of the
workflows you use.

Evaluate how easy or difficult it is to make changes to the software. If it

is a cloud application, chances are there will be limitations to the
extent of changes you can make.

The administrator console will have the capability to set up changes,

but you need to check how well these are designed. Things like user
level access, approval workflows, custom settings based on role or
geography are implemented differently across CRMs.

This is an area where the Open Source CRM will trounce any cloud
version. With Open Source you have total freedom to make all the
changes you need but at a cost. Those changes will need you to have
a fair understanding of the inner workings. In all likelihood you might
need to toggle between configuration settings and programmatic
changes.

If you don’t have in-house resources to make the required

modifications, customizing open-source can be much more
challenging and costly than it seems.
 Integrations
A CRM is vital part of the company’s sales-tech or martech stack. It is
quite unusual that the CRM will be used as a standalone application.

This means that the ability of your free CRM to integrate with other
applications becomes critical. The true value of a technology stack is
only realized when various components integrate well with each other
with a high degree of automation.

Unless the CRM offers you interoperability, it will be a dissonant piece of

the technology solution and you will be dealing with the pain of
fragmented and outdated customer data.

Here are some of the key integrations you should be looking for:

• Email
• Calendar
• Social Media
• Web forms
• Telephony
• Video Calling
• Collaboration Applications
 Scalability
While you evaluate the CRM application from its ability to handle the
current requirements for your business, it is important that you
evaluate its ability to scale.

The configurations that work for a two person startup with a handful of
early adopters won’t be adequate when it grows to a 50 person team
with hundreds of paying customers. As companies grow, their
processes mature and evolve and the demands on the CRM changes.
A good solution should be capable of evolving along with the
organization.

With Open Source there should ideally be no limit on some parameters

like number of users, but if the design is not robust you might see
performance challenges at scale with large datasets and an increase
concurrent users. It is important that you look for an Open Source
solution that has a proven track record of being used with
organizations of all sizes before you invest in it.

With cloud solutions, it is useful to check what the upgrade path across
free and paid editions are - is there a seamless way to upgrade when
you are ready to? Will the provider assist with any required migrations
and customizations? Are there performance benchmarks for the
editions at your expected workloads? These are all aspects to evaluate
before you commit to the CRM solution.
 Security
Security is a critical aspect to evaluate in your evaluation of a CRM
solution.

The CRM is going to hold all your mission critical customer data. An
insecure application could prove disastrous.

An important aspect to consider is if there are user level access

restrictions that can be enabled. The software should allow for different
permission levels and options to be easily set.

If you are dealing with user data from regions like the EU that have
strict data privacy laws, you must also check if the software you are
choosing enables you to comply with these laws. For example, if you
have customer data on EU nationals, does the software store data
within the European Union or does it force you store the data in an
offshore data centre?

An Open-Source solution gives you near absolute control over data

storage and access, especially if you are hosting the CRM on an local
server on-premise. But this brings in a different set of challenges, since
now you need to ensure that the latest security patches are applied
and you are on top of any new security bugs that might have been
discovered which might potentially endanger your customer data.
 Community (OS)
This aspect applies to Open-Source solutions more than cloud
applications that you might be considering.

A large, active community and a large number of downloads signals a

product with wide acceptance and a robust ecosystem to get
questions answered.

Support is often seen as one of the biggest stumbling blocks for Open-
Source adoption. A vibrant community increases the chances of
getting support for challenges you face.

There are usually three broad types of community support:

User Support: This is the support that participants in the community

provide to each other. This is usually about how to configure features
and get certain functionality to work.

System/Developer Support: This is the support the developer

community provides for solving issues within the code base itself.

Paid/Solution Support: A vibrant ecosystem will have specialists who

can provide you bespoke solutions for a price.

Another dimension to check is how well updated the User/Developer

documentation for the Open Source Project is along with the frequency
of updates and new releases. Using an Open-Source CRM that doesn’t
have an active community will hobble you with more problems.
 Support (Cloud)
While Open-Source solutions primarily depend on the user community
or implementation experts to provide support, when choosing a cloud
solution one should take a close look at quality of support provided by
the vendor.

Just because you are starting off with the free edition of a CRM does
not mean that you don’t need support. The CRM is a mission critical
application and the last thing you want is to be unable to solve
customer queries or close deals because you have issues with the tool.

A good CRM solution will also have well written and easy to understand
documentation and bug fix lists. This will reduce the need for you to
wait on their support team.

Some software providers might have varying levels of service for free
tiers compared to their paid versions. You might also to read up on
reviews about the quality of support and see what channels support is
offered on – email/phone/chat/social media.

An important point to consider here is the target group the CRM is

designed for. If you are a startup or small business, consider a CRM that
is built with the challenges of small businesses in mind. Using enterprise
grade solutions might seem attractive, but remember they are
focussed on large multi-million dollar clients. You may not get anything
close to the support you need when you are looking for it.
 Licensing
This is an area that is often misunderstood by users. We covered this in
detail with the explanation of Gratis and Libre.

But it all boils down to one basic truth: Licensees of software are not
owners.

It is almost a given that the average user will never read the licensing
agreements, terms of use, conditions for appropriate/fair use, reuse
and distribution rights. But the onus is on the user to comply with these.

Licensing generally will fit into one of these broad categories:

Open Source “Copyleft”: These do not permit the use of source code or
product in proprietary or commercial products.

Open Source “Liberal”: Licenses that permit unfettered use of

code/product

Free Software: licenses that permit free use, but does not provide
access to source code or permit redistribution/packaging

Traditional Copyright: All rights are reserved by the developer.

Pay attention to which license you are agreeing to when you choose
your CRM. All open-source licenses are not the same, neither are all
“Free” versions of cloud solutions.
 Costs
Last but not the least – costs.

Consider the true costs of deploying the solution you are considering.

The upfront costs might be zero, but there will be other explicit and
implicit costs that you will incur depending on your choice of software.

Some of the costs you need to factor for are:

• Infrastructure (Hardware/Network/Storage)
• Training for Administrators
• Training for Users
• Costs for migration from existing solution
• Costs to customize/integrate with existing applications
• Upgrade costs

Establishing ROI for your investments in a CRM solution will depend on

you getting a complete understanding of all the costs that are involved
with the implementation. This is a non-trivial and critical activity.

The lure of “Free” can often end up in expensive train-wrecks down the
road. Evaluate software fit on all the parameters listed here to avoid
pitfalls as you embark on your CRM journey.

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