What are the hidden costs of your small business CRM?

SmallBizCRM Staff – January 15th 2024

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The cost of your CRM depends on where you get it, how much you pay for it, and how much value it delivers to the organization. There are hidden costs to consider as well. If you’re not careful, the wrong CRM software could end up costing you more than you bargained for — especially if you don’t know what to look for when shopping around. Here are some hidden costs of choosing a small business CRM that you should keep in mind before making your final selection:

Base software price only.

This is the price of the software itself — without the price of a CRM implementation. Many CRMs offer annual subscriptions that cover a portion of the software’s cost. While this is a good deal, it may not be the best deal if you’re only looking at the base software price. If your CRM is a good fit for your organization, the CRM implementation price could end up being lower than the price of the CRM software. Even then, though, you’d have to take into account the cost of CRM implementation (which can be anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars, depending on the size of your company and the CRM vendor).

Support and maintenance fee.

If a CRM is designed to work with a certain software or software suite, you can expect to have to pay for any support that’s related to that. In addition, some CRM vendors charge a monthly maintenance fee, which covers things like security updates, backups and upgrades. If the CRM you’re considering doesn’t charge a monthly maintenance fee, there’s a good chance that it’ll automatically cost you less than the CRM vendor you choose.

Data integration cost.

If you start collecting data from every employee, customer, and supplier in your organization, you’re likely to need a way to bring that data together. You could do this manually with spreadsheets, or you could spend money to make your CRM vendor store and manage that data for you. One way to reduce the cost of data integration is to use data you already have. You likely have purchase documents, customer invoices, and email messages that could be relevant to your CRM data. You could import these documents into your CRM to reduce the cost of data integration.

Time wasted on data entry.

Many CRM vendors have automated tools to centralize data and streamline data entry. However, most CRM vendors don’t advertise these features, and they don’t always advertise them in their sales materials. If you choose a CRM without centralized data and automated tools, you could end up wasting a lot of time entering the same data over and over again. This could be especially true if your organization’s data is scattered among multiple systems.

Bottom line

You’ll be happy you chose your CRM vendor if you know how much it costs to implement that CRM. You’ll also want to know how much it will cost you to maintain your CRM and support your CRM’s functionality. Finally, you need to consider how much time you will waste on data entry. These are the hidden costs of choosing a CRM that can keep you from making the best decision for your organization.