If you’ve ever inherited a CRM, in all likelihood you’ll know this uncomfortable feeling: users avoid it, reporting can’t be trusted, and the client experience suffers in ways that are difficult to pinpoint but very easy to feel.
Choosing a CRM is a critical operating model decision affecting all functions of a business. Done well, it becomes the backbone of predictable growth and consistent client handling. Done badly, it becomes an expensive habit you keep feeding because switching feels worse than suffering.
This article is a step-by-step guide to choosing a CRM with commercial outcomes and client experience front and centre.
Step 1: Start with how your business actually wins revenue
Before you sit through demos or compare feature lists from shortlisted vendors, draft what you’re trying to enable commercially. A CRM will amplify whatever is already true about your go-to-market. If you don’t start with a clear strategy, the system becomes a mirror of that ambiguity and the team will improvise their way around it.
Begin with your ideal client profile and your revenue process. Who are you trying to win and keep? How do deals typically start - through inbound, outbound, referrals, partners, account expansion, events, or a mix? How long do they take? Who needs to be involved? What do you need to know early in the cycle to qualify properly to avoid building a vapourware pipeline full of hope and guesswork and a contact list of ghosts?
It helps to write a simple “CRM purpose statement” (including resource reality) in plain English. For example: “We need a system that helps us respond quickly to inbound interest, run structured follow-up, manage opportunities consistently across a small team, and give leadership forecasting they can trust.” This statement is a grounding filter when a vendor starts showing you all the fancy extras, which can be very distracting in the era of AI enablement.
Step 2: Map the client journey, not just your pipeline
A lot of CRM decisions get caught inside the sales pipeline. Pipeline matters, but it’s only one part of the client experience. The real question to ask is whether the CRM supports the full journey from first touch to expansion/renewal and advocacy, and whether it helps your commercial team present as organised and consistent throughout the buyer experience.
Think through the stages your clients’ buyer experience: anonymous interest, known lead, qualification, proposal, verbal committment, contracting, onboarding, delivery, upsell and cross-sell. For each stage, ask what a good experience looks like for the client and what has to happen behind the scenes to make that experience smooth. Where do leads and deals get stuck today? Where do handoffs break? Where do clients have to repeat themselves because internal context gets lost between teams?
When you map the journey this way, it becomes easier to see what should live inside the CRM, who owns what part and what should sit alongside it. You also stop designing around internal departmental lines and start designing around the client’s reality, which is usually where the commercial gains live.
Step 3: Decide how the CRM fits into your wider tech stack
Your CRM is never standalone, it will sit between your website, your marketing channels, your email and calendar, your proposal and contracting tools, your invoicing, your support or customer success workflows, and your reporting. The mistake many teams make is treating the CRM as a walled-garden, then being surprised when the “integrations later” plan turns into a long-running painful saga.
At this stage, draft a basic workflow view of your stack and ask what needs to be the single source of truth for accounts and contacts. Decide how leads will enter the system, where consent will be captured, how attribution will be handled, and what will be used for reporting and what data passports into finance and operations systems. It’s also worth being honest about your integration appetite. Every integration is a mini-product you now own. Someone has to maintain it, troubleshoot it, and notice when it silently breaks.
This is where you should also consider whether you want an in-suite approach or a best-of-breed approach. Suites can reduce integration complexity, but they can also push you into paying for modules you weren’t planning to buy. Best-of-breed stacks can be powerful, but they demand dedicated specialist operational ownership and discipline. Neither is inherently “right.” The right choice is the one your team can actually manage without the system degrading over time.
Step 4: Take your data seriously before you move anything
If your current data is messy, migrating it won’t magically clean it, in 99% of cases it will multiply and formalise the mess as CRMs can create the illusion of order while storing poor data in structured fields.
Before you migrate, run a practical data quality check. How many duplicates do you have? Are companies and contacts up to date, what fields have gaps and are they critical for segmentation? Are job titles reliable? Do you have consistent lead source values, or is it a creative-writing exercise? Can you tell where leads come from and whether they convert? And importantly, do you have consent captured properly, with enough detail to be confident you’re GDPR compliant?
Data cleaning and enrichment should happen before migration wherever possible. Deduplicate. Standardise key fields like industry, lifecycle stage, region, lead source. Decide what’s worth migrating and what should be archived. Migrating everything “just in case” is fatal, do the hard yards first, users and your bottom line will thank you later. You want the system to feel useful on day one and that means removing noise, not importing it.
Step 5: Design for real user behaviour (not wishful user behaviour)
Most CRM problems are user behaviour problems disguised as technology problems. If it’s hard to use, people won’t use it. If it feels like admin, they’ll avoid it. If it doesn’t help them sell or serve clients, it will become something they update when they’re told off.
Decide what you need users to do, and keep it grounded in reality. Sales teams need to be able to capture activity quickly, keep opportunities moving, and know what to do next without the CRM becoming another layer of friction. Marketing needs clean segmentation, reporting and reliable handoffs. Leadership needs always-on forecasting they can believe, and visibility into bottlenecks that doesn’t rely on someone building a fresh spreadsheet every single time, where a minor deviation in report building creates a different number for the same thing, leading to mistrust.
This is also where you choose your “non-negotiables” for adoption. If follow-up tasks aren’t created consistently today, you’ll want automation. If leads aren’t contacted quickly enough, you’ll want routing rules and alerts. If forecasting is opaque, you’ll want clear stage definitions and hygiene checks. The best CRM is the one that makes the right behaviours the easiest behaviours.
Step 6: Draft requirements as commercial outcomes vs feature lists
It’s tempting to write requirements like a shopping list: “custom objects,” “advanced reporting,” “workflows,” “AI.” A more effective approach is to express requirements in plain English terms of what the system needs to make possible.
For example, “We need to route inbound leads to the right person automatically based on territory and product line, and we need to see response time”, or “We need campaign reporting that helps us decide where to invest marketing time and money, even if it’s not perfect attribution.”
Once you have requirements phrased commercially, you can prioritise them better. Some capabilities are essential on day one, some matter later, and some can be handled by another tool in the stack. When everything is treated as equally important, nothing becomes important and you tend to overbuy and overwhelm.
Step 7: Pressure-test pricing like you’re buying a house!
This is where many CRM selections go off the rails: teams compare entry-level pricing, feel relieved, and then discover that the features they assumed were “standard” are locked behind higher tiers or separate modules.
You want to understand exactly which tier includes the capabilities that matter to your plan. Lead routing and assignment rules are a common one. Workflow automation is another. Reporting depth, forecasting tools, campaign tracking, and even basic permissions can be licence-gated depending on the vendor. Some systems also restrict things like the number of workflows, contacts, reports, API calls, or custom objects, which feels fine until you start scaling and then suddenly hits you with an ugly surprise bill.
There’s also the module trap. A vendor may position the CRM as one product, but for the setup you need, you may end up buying marketing automation, integration apps (eg into your finance application), or reporting add-ons earlier than you expected. That isn’t necessarily bad, but it should be an intentional decision with a two-year cost view, not something you discover after implementation that becomes an unforseen budget bunker-buster.
If you take one thing from this section, let it be this: build a simple two-year total cost of ownership model. Include licences, implementation, integrations, storage, enrichment tools, and the internal time and human resources required to run it. The cheapest option on month one is never the cheapest option by month eighteen.
Step 8: Look for flexibility early
Your business will change. You’ll refine your ICP, adjust your products, enter a new region, or add a partner channel and your CRM needs to move with you without becoming fragile.
Evaluate flexibility through specific scenarios. Ask how easy it is to update pipeline stages without breaking reporting, how segmentation changes are handled, what it takes to support account hierarchies if you move into enterprise. Ask how routing rules evolve as you add territories or product lines. Pay attention to whether customization is clean and governable, or whether it encourages every team to create their own fields and definitions until reporting becomes meaningless (a personal “bette noir”!).
Flexibility is useful when it supports evolution but can quickly becomes dangerous when it allows freedom of inconsistency at scale.
Step 9: Treat AI as an enablement layer that depends on your foundations
AI features in CRM platforms can be genuinely valuable. They can reduce admin through enrichment, suggest next actions, help with forecasting signals, improve data quality, and speed up content creation for emails and follow-ups. When they’re implemented well, they can genuinely benefit productivity and consistency.
AI also has dependencies, yes, pesky data hygiene, again! If your underlying data is inconsistent, AI outputs become unreliable. If activity is not logged consistently, AI insights will be incomplete. As AI often touches communication and customer data, you should check privacy and storage terms carefully, particularly if calls and emails are being analysed or summarised.
A sensible approach is to decide which AI use cases you can benefit from now, and which ones should wait until your data, user and process maturity improve. That avoids buying “AI potential” you can’t actually use yet.
Step 10: Run a proof of concept that reflects real workflows
A CRM demo is designed to impress, but a proof of concept reveals the real truth.
Test the workflows that matter most: lead capture through to qualification and handoff, opportunity progression with clear next steps and rules, and reporting that supports decisions. Use real data, even if it’s a small sample and put the system in front of the people who will use it daily and watch for where friction appears. How many clicks does it take to log an activity? How clear is the pipeline view? Can you tell what to do next without hunting? Can marketing see what happened to leads after handoff? Can leadership see pipeline health without someone interpreting it for them?
It is helpful to score it in practical terms: speed, clarity, reliability, and user willingness. If users resist during a trial, they won’t magically embrace it after you’ve signed a three-year contract. Go onto G2 and/or Capterra and read the honest “warts and all” reviews, they will give you further insight into what you can expect and potential roadblocks/mis-understandings.
Step 11: Implement a CRM like a business-critical solution, with proper ownership
Implementation should be treated as a business change programme, not a simple software setup.
Resource and ownership is critical, you need a business owner who cares about commercial outcomes and an ops owner who keeps the system clean, consistent, and continuously improving. Get your process and definitions agreed before you configure too much. Focus on a “minimum viable CRM” for the first release: core fields, one pipeline, essential dashboards, and the automations that remove friction and protect speed to revenue.
Training needs to be role-based and scenario-based. People don’t need a tour of the menu. They need to know how to do their job in the system quickly, and why it helps them. Reinforcement matters too: regular hygiene checks, clear expectations, and reporting that leaders actually use.
Step 12: Put governance in place from the start
CRMs don’t usually fail fast and loud, they degrade slowly over time. Fields proliferate, definitions drift, duplicates pile up, reporting becomes questionable, and users quietly stop trusting the system.
Clear, documented governance prevents this. For example, decide who can change pipeline stages and fields, standardise lead source values and lifecycle definitions with buy-in from the relevant stakeholders (Marketing and Sales) and establish how duplicates are handled. Assign ownership of dashboards and set a cadence for reviewing whether they still reflect how you sell and serve, archive those that are no longer used to avoid overwhelm. An oft overlooked and critical action is to set an ops rhythm of business for integration monitoring to ensure data doesn’t quietly stop syncing.
A CRM is a living, breathing ecosystem in need of solid, consistent stewardship.
Pitfalls I wish more teams spotted early
One of the most common traps is buying based on entry price and discovering later that the capabilities you assumed were included require a major tier upgrade and/or eye-watering storage fees. Another is realising that the CRM relies on other modules for basic commercial functions meaning you end-up buying a broader suite sooner than planned. Lock-ins can also emerge in subtler ways: proprietary objects, limited functionality, or complex implementations that make switching feel impossible.
There’s also the human trap of designing a CRM for reporting rather than execution. It looks great in dashboards, but it doesn’t help the team move work forward, learn and iterate for greater success and faster contract to cash cycles. When this happens, the system becomes a compliance exercise, adoption drops, data quality suffers, and leadership ends up back in spreadsheets. The irony is that the business then blames the tool, when the real issue is a mismatch between system design and user reality.
Call to action
A final word as someone who’s cleaned up too many CRM messes…
Choose the CRM that fits with your commercial strategy, user behaviours, data maturity, and wider stack. Get pricing clarity and future early, and please. . . clean your data ruthlessly before you migrate or set and stick to quality standards if starting from scratch, your entire business will thank you later. Treat AI as a productivity layer that sits on top of good foundations and implement every piece with ownership and governance so it doesn’t quietly deteriorate.
If you practice these core rules consistently your CRM becomes something people rely on rather than avoid and you can spend your time improving revenue performance instead of arguing about whose spreadsheet is correct.
For a structured way to shortlist and choose the right CRM, download our CRM Selection Scorecard
Use it with your team during vendor demos for an evidence-based evaluation anchored to your commercial goals.
If you’d like a second set of eyes, we can also review your requirements and vendor options and help you avoid the common (expensive) traps. Get in touch and we will introduce you to people who genuinely know what good looks like.
